No, no they can’t take that away from me is an old Billie Holiday song that, we think, refers to love and not labour rights. But, unfortunately, they can take things away and sometimes do. But sometimes they have to give back what they have wrongfully taken.
The recent Supreme Court decision which pitted the B.C. Teachers Federation against the B.C. Government is a good case in point.
Nearly fifteen years ago then-premier Gordon Campbell decided that the government just wasn’t going to honour an agreement with the teachers federation. He thought he could just enact legislation and that would enable the government to go back on its word and bond.
As Susan Lambert says in a story on page 3 of today’s paper, “It felt absolutely wrong in a democracy. … It felt very much like we were sliding into some kind of dictatorship. I know that sounds like a bit of hyperbole, but, in fact, it felt that way. It didn’t seem to me, and to all of us, that in a democracy such an act could happen.”
Lambert, president of the BCTF from 2010 to 2013, was a teacher-librarian in Burnaby in 2002 when the Campbell government passed legislation to strip teachers of their right to bargain class size, class composition and ratios for specialist teachers like teacher-librarians.
For the average person in B.C. it looked like politics as usual. The government getting one back on the teachers union in the ongoing war.
But for many it was a chilling move. What is the point of negotiating in good faith when a premier can literally just rip it up with a piece of legislation?
The act galvanized groups who believed that governments should keep their word.
Premier Christy Clark now says she sees the decision as an opportunity to invest in education.
“It’s a chance for us to talk about how to invest more money in kids,” Clark said in a weekend interview.
And for that statement she gets the ‘spin of the year award.’
She was the education minister in 2002 when the government drew the line in the sand. She now sounds like she had nothing to do with it.
The decision cost kids lost opportunities. It cost taxpayers huge amounts in legal bills, and it was an incredible waste of time and energy for everybody involved.
Teachers and taxpayers deserve nothing less than an apology from Clark.
