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Hollow victory for teachers

Every parent and teacher has faced the precocious child who seizes on a mistake or an inconsistency and puts the adult in an awkward situation, trapped in their faulty reasoning.

Every parent and teacher has faced the precocious child who seizes on a mistake or an inconsistency and puts the adult in an awkward situation, trapped in their faulty reasoning.

The response from the adult is as old as time: "You may be right but you still can't have what you want."

Teachers may understand this but it appears their union does not. The B.C. Teachers Federation has spent more than a decade and vast sums of money on lawyers in legal challenges to the highest courts in the land to show that they are right and the Liberals were wrong to rip up their contract in 2001.

What have those legal challenges given to the teachers walking the picket lines?

If moral victories made mortgage payments, teachers would have nothing to worry about. Sadly, that's not the case. Their union spent more than 10 years distracted by proving in court how wrong the Liberals were and not enough time and money on the core mission of any union, which is to get the best possible wages, benefits and working conditions for its members.

What Premier Gordon Campbell and his education minister of the day, Christy Clark, did in 2001 was wrong, plain and simple. A binding contract should not be able to be torn in two just because new management takes over and finds the terms of that contract inconvenient. The teachers were right but their union made the mistake of thinking that being right actually mattered.

Instead of building a big war chest to fight the government on the picket lines and devoting a bit of cash on a public relations campaign to convince parents (voters, in the eyes of government) that teachers, not politicians, are invested in education, the BCTF paid lawyers to prove what everyone already knew - that was a crappy thing the Liberals did to B.C. teachers and it shouldn't have been allowed.

That's a pretty expensive and time-consuming moral victory.

The union, like the precocious child, still appears confused that being right doesn't get you what you want. At this point, teachers have no choice but to get behind the mismanagement of their own union leadership and walk a picket line with no strike pay and no money coming into the coffers through union dues because nobody on the membership is working. That's cutting off your nose, ears and lips to spite your face.

The BCTF is also under the mistaken impression that teaching is a noble profession. It is in the classroom and in the hearts and souls of the best educators but it's worthless at the bargaining table, where the only measure that matters in the final analysis is dollars and cents, for both employers and employees.

The bargaining table is no place to be thinking like a teacher.

Furthermore, a growing number of parents no longer see their child's education as a sacred trust between teacher and student. Instead, many parents now view their child's education as an investment in their future. Looking through the lens of the modern consumer, faith in the public school system and its teachers takes a back seat to parents wanting the best education they can get for their children, wherever that may be and for whatever price that may go for.

As Jeni Lee pointed out in her letter to the editor in Friday's Citizen, even public school teachers are parents first. She has her autistic child in private school to get him the support that is unavailable to him in the public system she teaches in.

Lee and all public school teachers deserve better. They deserve a government that pays them more and gives them the working conditions and the external support they need to give children, who will one day be our future business leaders and premiers, the education they need.

Teachers also deserve a union that represents them properly, spends the money of their members wisely and gives thoughtful advice on best options going forward. On that count, teachers should be giving a D on the report card of their union leadership.

Teachers have every right to be angry with the provincial government but some of that righteous indignation needs to go towards the union bosses that forgot that victories at the bargaining table, not victories in the courtroom, are the only wins that matter.