While the B.C. Liberal determination to hold the line on costs has been one of the main obstacles to settlement in the dispute with teachers, the other was the union's drive to return to local bargaining on most issues.
The "net-zero mandate," meaning no net increase in overall compensation costs over two years, was rightly identified as "a fundamental obstacle," in the recent report of assistant deputy labour minister Trevor Hughes, appointed as a fact-finder in the lengthy dispute.
But his report also identified the "split of issues" between local and provincial bargaining as a no-less-fundamental obstacle to the parties being able to come to terms.
Hughes noted how at the outset of the current round of negotiations, the B.C. Teachers' Federation had "outlined its intention to negotiate only compensation issues - salary, benefits, paid leaves and hours of work - at the provincial table and all other items locally."
It then filed the issues, more than 1,000 of them, that it intended to negotiate locally, via face to face talks with some 60 school districts. But the bar-gaining agency for the school districts took the position that the union would first have to renegotiate a long-standing letter of understanding relegating those issues to the provincial table.
Result: stalemate.
"No discussion is happening between the parties on over 1,100 proposals," Hughes reported. "The outstanding split of issues is another fundamental obstacle ... to the parties being able to reach a voluntary settlement."
The impasse over local versus provincial bargaining was recognized in passing by the B.C. Liberals in Bill 22, their legislative attempt to end the dispute in the education sector via mediation and a six-month ban on further job action.
The terms of reference incorporated into the bill would allow a mediator to engage the parties on "matters that may be locally negotiated between the BCTF and a board of education if those matters do not affect any other school district, and would, in the opinion of the mediator, be more effectively negotiated as local matters."
The pretext, as Education Minister George Abbott explained it during debate on the legislation, was that "there continues to be a very lively debate about what should appropriately be provincial and what should appropriately be local."
But as he also noted, the lively debate goes back to the previous New Democratic Party government, which shifted the balance of negotiations with teachers from the local to the provincial level.
The New Democrats made the shift in direction in contravention of a pledge they made to teachers during the 1991 election campaign to protect local bargaining.
Once in office, they appointed a commission to review wage and benefits bargaining across the public sector and it blew the whistle on the way the teachers' union was leveraging local bargaining to the benefit of its members.
The report highlighted a concern about "powerful local teachers' associations, acting in concert with a more powerful central teachers' federation, whipsawing individual school boards into accepting teachers' bargaining demands because, on a district by district basis, they are not able to resist those demands."
The perceived result was "a significant weighting of the balance of power in favour of unions," driving up wage settlements in the education sector, and creating a spillover effect on other public sector talks.
Armed with those findings, the New Democrats embarked on a legislative two-step, starting with a 1993 bill that consolidated bargaining across the public sector, clearing the way for a bill in the following year that imposed provincial bar-gaining on most issues in the education sector.
"A major step toward dealing with whipsawing and the like," explained the then minister of finance in tabling the first bill. "School boards routinely have negotiated collective agreements which they don't have the funding for. So the following year, they either dramatically cut service and blame the provincial government, or they come to the government and ask for more money."
The author of those comments was a fellow named Glen Clark. Next year, his successor as finance minister, Elizabeth Cull, drove home the rationale with the followup bill.
"The very system of local-by-local bargaining has created a whipsawing between school boards and teachers," she told the house. "Under this system, demands achieved in one district are pressed upon employers [school boards] in another district, and in some cases to the point of dispute."
Some 52 of them in seven years, by her reckoning. Her figures also showed that a three-year, 18-per-cent increase in the education budget had been eaten up by a 23-per-cent jump in wage costs over the same period.
The reaction from the BCTF to the legislative move against local bargaining was not long in coming. "A power grab," the then BCTF president Ray Worley called it, and he got that right.
"The bill will improve cost effectiveness for B.C. taxpayers," as the New Democrats explained their intentions at the time, "and there will be a greater balance between the employer side and the union side."
Having rebalanced that equation in favour of taxpayers, no provincial government, neither this one nor the next, is likely to ever hand the whip hand of whipsawing back to the union.
