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.

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.

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