The Editor,
So here we are, less than a week before 560,000 children, 41,000 teachers, and 35,000 support staff are expected to return to school.
The Minister of Education’s talking points call for “breaking the cycle” by negotiating a settlement, rather than having the “big, bad, government” legislate one. The Minister’s refrain sidesteps the fact that government created the cycle. So, here we are again, stuck at an impasse, led by a government that promised education stability, yet has delivered labour unrest in three out of four school years (including the coming year) since 2011.
In the fall of 2013, a government bureaucrat testified that in 2011, government sought to provoke teachers into striking in order to gain public support so that they could pass legislation, legislation which they were subsequently found guilty of having imposed.
The government now has the strike it wanted. Its only response is to send the Minister of Education on a media blitz, using well-worn phrases like “optimistic,” “24/7 bargaining,” and “breaking the paradigm,” and to promote a government website that reduces education to $40/day for babysitting, safety courses for the teens, and games for the younger set.
In the last election, the government campaigned on the promise of “education stability.” If having three out of the last four school years marked by labour unrest is the government’s definition of stability, I shudder to think what instability looks like.
Sharon Hales
Richmond
