Hypocritical: professing beliefs or virtues that one does not have.
I was trying to avoid commenting on the teacher's wage negotiations and job
action.
Not because I don't feel strongly about the issue. I do. But contract negotiations are complex with nuances that are often overlooked or misunderstood by
anyone not at the table.
Is this recent round of job actions all about wages? No, that is only part of the demands being made.
Are teachers being unreasonable in their demands? I would suggest not. After all, at the forefront of their demands is the need to address class sizes not wages.
At least, that is how I see it from the outside and from the conversations that I have had with many teachers on the subject.
But there is a lot more on the table and negotiations are complex. They need to be carried out in good faith with both sides willing to give and take.
This is why the intransigence of Minister Abbott has been a wet blanket on the whole process. You can't negotiate a fair collective agreement if one side is unwilling to reconsider their position.
Before the negotiations began and the teachers took job action, the government declared that there would be no additional money for salary increases.
Kind of puts a damper on the whole idea of negotiating if that is truly the government's position. After all, a negotiation requires give and take. A "no means no" position prejudices the
process from inception.
But as I said, I don't have enough information to really talk about what is
going on at the negotiating table. Indeed, I would suggest that most people don't have enough information and I would even put some of the government's own backbenchers in that
category.
However, the most recent round of television commercials by the BC Liberals should stick in the craw of anyone with the slightest recollection of the past ten years.
A month or so ago, we started seeing commercials telling us that the way our children learn is different (which is not true, but that is a whole other subject.)
These were friendly, typical government advertisements encouraging
people to get involved at bcedplan.ca.
"The world has changed. The way we educate our children should, too," is the tag line for the website and the
commercials.
But over the past week, these commercials have changed. They start out the same but then the voice over points out: "The union wants more money for wages. We think that money should be spent on children."
They then tells us how the government thinks that there should be more instructional assistance in the classroom and other good things and finish by inviting us to join the conversation.
Seriously? Seriously?!
After a decade of cutting librarians, counsellors, teachings positions, special education teachers and closing schools, this government is claiming that it is only concerned about the best interests of the students.
Talk about hypocritical.
Anyone who has paid the slightest
attention to the education system over the past decade is only too painfully aware of just how much has been taken away.
Our schools system used to be one of the best in the world.
And all of this has been done in the name of tax cuts. Yup, we have the lowest personal income tax rates in the country for the bottom two groups we are told (which isn't actually true) but the cost is that publicly funded
institutions are left short.
We can't afford to give public servants wage increases we are told.
For the past 17 years, the government mandate has been zero per cent in all of its negotiations.
The result is continual wage erosion which means those employees are not keeping up with inflation and are not able to buy the things that businesses would like to sell.
The result is that business profits are not what they should be and the economy has not grown as much as it should have. And the tax burden seems heavier than it need be.
The net result is that we are further behind, not further ahead, after a decade of BC Liberal tax policy. Don't take my word for it - check out the government's own BC Progress Board reports or financial review.
And the $2 billion dollars that a 15 per cent wage increase will cost has me very worried about this government's understanding of math. If $2 billion is the total over three years, that would mean that the first five per cent increase would see a total wage increase of $333 million.
However, if $333 million is five per cent of the total salary mass for teachers then the present total would be $6.66 billion.
A pretty neat trick given that the education ministry only has a budget of $5.17 billion.
Or maybe the minister was just being hypocritical.
