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Wage
Controls Could Cost Liberals Dearly
It seems, like most
progressive and even centre-right governments that just think they are
progressive, there is a total lack of understanding of the old advice from
George Santayana- ¡°Those who fail to understand history are condemned to relive
it.¡± The Ontario Liberals are about to make the same colossal error made by Bob
Rae with his profoundly ill advised and reactionary social contract.
The
Liberals seem to take the political support of teachers and other public
servants totally for granted with a ¡°they have no choice but to support us
since the option is the Tim Hudak Tories and an NDP that nobody believes can win
the next election.¡± This political strategy is always a loser strategy yet
premiers and governments return to it time after time. Do Premier McGuinty and
Finance Minister Dwight Duncan, the point man for wage controls, have a fiscal
problem? Yes they do. Did public sector labour in general and teachers in
particular play any role whatsoever in creating this crisis? No they did not.
Is it even intelligent policy to restrain public spending during at best, a
fragile recovery? No, it is dumb as a bag of hammers. At the absolute maximum it
constitutes a 5% saving on an ever shrinking $19 billion? Dollar deficit but it
could end the careers of McGuinty and Duncan and several other Grits.
The
Liberals are banking on the idea that public sector unions, particularly
teachers and nurses, will lose their nerve when confronted with the idea that
failure to support the Liberals means a frying pan to the fire fate under the
Hudak, Son of Harris, Tories. CUPE is discounted at the get-go due to their
unswerving loyalty to the NDP. The Ontario Public Service Employees Union, OPSEU,
is a little more malleable and a little more oriented to strategic voting.
Alienating OPSEU has consequences since it emboldens the internal NDP supporting
faction¡¯s ¡°we told you so¡± voting position. This is clearly not in the Liberals
interest. OPSEU is already successfully picketing and destroying Liberal Party
fundraising events like a recent Liberal golf tournament. Nevertheless, the most interesting groups are still the teachers and
the nurses. The teachers, when they act in concert, through their sheer size,
and strategic position are central to this publication so we need to take a
close look at their options.
The
outside view is that the Liberals have been good for publically funded education
and to the teachers. Some facts cannot be denied. The ELP is a big step forward,
and the peaceful settlement of collective agreements should not be
underestimated. Nevertheless, teachers are not happy in their classrooms under
the Liberal regime and cracks are beginning to show. There has been a massive
intensification in classroom education driven by misdirected accountability
measures focuses on the EQAO tests. The manic Michael Fullan Liberal drive to
push through ¡°plateaus¡± of scores and graduation rates ¡°by any means necessary¡±
including the watering down of credits, the pressuring of teachers to give
higher grades and more passes, credit recovery chicanery, and the narrowing and
hollowing out of the curriculum and the redirecting of the purpose of education
to the sole function of ¡°human capital production¡± is doing serious damage to
the education system and teachers really do feel like the guardians of a broad
liberal quality education system. Classroom teachers are seething with rage
regarding these developments and federation leaders can hear them.
Still,
there is a residual belief that education under the Tories could only get worse.
The Tories policy development process continues to float trial balloons such as
the use of uncertified teachers, breaking up the federations, phonics only
reading programs, and other lunatic fringe ideas that only spook educators even
more into thinking these ¡°know-nothing rubes and ideological fanatics¡± could
again be making education policy.
Is
there a way out of this abusive political relationship with the Liberals without
handing the keys to the nut jobs under Hudak? There is a political solution for
the federations, educators in general and the moderate-progressive movement.
Ontario
seems, on the surface, to be a 2 ½ - 3 party system but the fact of the matter
is this. Ontario with 108 seats is actually composed of, depending on your
criteria, about 70 safe seats for the three major parties. Any election in
Ontario is actually heavily triaged towards the 37 or so ¡°swing seats¡± that make
the critical difference to which party forms the government and to the real
realignment of forces, if there is one, after the election. Even in these few
swing seats, there are fewer ¡°3 way races¡± than the fingers of one hand. London
Fanshaw and Oshawa are among a very tiny group of seats in which all 3 parties
are strong. Almost every swing seat is really a Liberal-Tory slugfest in rural
and small town Ontario, with the NDP happy to get its deposit returned, or a
Liberal-NDP brawl in the industrial cities and the north, with the Tories
muttering in their redoubt in the country club seeking solace.
It is
this latter group of seats, listed below, the Liberal-NDP seats, that are the
key to a successful political strategy by the progressive but non-affiliated,
labour movement and supporters across the moderate-progressive sectors.
|
Riding |
Liberal MPP
*Cabinet Minister |
Liberal 2007 |
NDP 2007 |
PC
2007 |
|
Algoma-Manitoulin |
Mike Brown |
11 361 |
9 863 |
3 744 |
|
Davenport |
Tony Ruprecht |
12 467 |
10 880 |
3 047 |
|
Hamilton Mountain |
*Sophia Aggelonitis |
17 387 |
15 653 |
10 982 |
|
Ottawa Centre |
Yasir Naqvi |
18 255 |
16 161 |
10 416 |
|
Sault Ste Marie |
David Orazietti |
19 316 |
8 475 |
2 349 |
|
Sudbury |
*Rick Bartolucci |
19 307 |
8 914 |
2 605 |
|
Thunder Bay Atikokan |
Bill Mauro |
10 928 |
10 878 |
5 918 |
|
Thunder Bay Superior
North |
*Mike Gravelle |
13 373 |
10 938 |
2 688 |
|
Timiskaming-Cochrine |
David Ramsey |
11 588 |
10 954 |
3 659 |
|
Windsor Tecumseh |
*Dwight Duncan |
17 894 |
8 836 |
6 106 |
|
Windsor West |
*Sandra Pupatello |
16 821 |
8 604 |
5 652 |
|
York South-Weston |
Laura Albanese |
13 846 |
13 394 |
3 173 |
|
York West |
Mario Sergio |
13 246 |
6 764 |
2 484 |
Depending on Liberal behaviour between now and the 2011 election, the teachers
and their allies in the labour movement and beyond could offer, once again, to
save the Liberal from threatening Tories in close Liberal-Tory races such as
Ajax-Pickering, ADFW, Barrie, Bramalea-Gore Mountain, Brampton Springdale,
Brampton West, Don Valley West, Eglinton Lawrence Etobicoke Centre, Huron-Bruce,
Kitchener-Conestoga, Nipissing, Willowdale and other endangered Liberals or,
there being only so many resources to go around, take a pass on these seats and
concentrate on those above.
Of
course, this will never be part of a press conference or even a press release.
If this direction is chosen it will all be done in coffee shops and restaurants
where the people who really make serious political decisions, unlike those in
the legislature, ply their trade? I can only tell you this. If a series of
teacher leaders or their bonafide representatives, were to take a list such as
the one offered above to lunch with some serious representatives of the
government and/or the Liberal Party and put it to them straight that if there
are wage and benefit controls imposed on the teachers and other education
workers, the federations would feel that they had no option but to put every
resource they could lay their hands on behind the NDP in the 13 seats above,
including five cabinet ministers, or reasonable facsimile, there is one thing
you can count on. There would be no wage and benefit controls in Ontario.
Teachers and teacher federations must also demand that cutbacks of any type in
education that might affect the classrooms or the livelihoods of education
workers must be preceded by the total abolition of the EQAO. Governments need to
learn that when they have little or no money to put on the table to ensure a
peaceful education-labour climate, then they will need to put power and
management¡¯s rights on the table instead. This would mean the abolition of the
OCT and the dismissal of Michael Fullan from any position, paid or unpaid, of
influence over education policy. His instincts and prescriptions are always
wrong and counterproductive.
This
must lead to a mellowing out of the manic intensification and narrowed focus
ushered in by Fullan and his acolytes. The government must be told, in no
uncertain terms, that when it refuses to pay the piper, it forfeits the right to
call the tune.
¡¡
Corporate Pay
vs Teacher Pay
My pal Erika Shaker at CCPA sent me this one a week before I saw it in
Education Week under the heading ¡°Oh Snap¡± which made me laugh. It always
seemed..Full Story
¡¡
A Great
Teacher Questions ¡°Education Reform¡± in the USA.
Maybe I
am a cock-eyed optimist on public education but the entire series of right-wing
reforms seem to falling flat on their face at least on the surface..Full Story¡¡
Obama Makes the Same Mistakes as McGuinty in Education, Angers His Base.
Somehow the American Republicans and the Canadian Conservatives
understand that when you alienate your base vote in a society where fewer and
fewer vote you cannot survive. This message seems to be lost on clueless
American Democrats, and Canadian Liberals and New Democrats...Full Story
¡¡
Doug Little on Early Childhood Politics,
The Agenda With Steve Paikin
See video at:
http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/theagenda/index.cfm?page_id=7&bpn=779646&ts=2009-11-05%2020:00:00.0
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Past Issues
49th Edition (July 5, 2010)
48th Edition of the
Little Education Report !
47th Edition of the Little Education Report !
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