As the newly ordained minister of education, Mike Bernier, the MLA for Peace River South and former Dawson Creek mayor, faces a formidable challenge: create some semblance of labour peace with the province’s teachers before the current bitterly negotiated agreement expires in 2019.
The next provincial election is scheduled for May 9, 2017, but that still leaves a politically narrow margin before negotiations between government and the BC Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) begin again if Bernier hopes to avoid a reprise of the 2014 fiasco, which resulted in the kids losing the equivalent of a month’s instructional time and teachers losing five weeks’ salary.
The majority of parents were no happier, and the imprudent and clumsy attempt to buy them off by placing a price of $40 per day on their kids’ education simply inflamed the situation for parents and teachers, and not just for a few taxpayers.
A big part of Bernier’s job will be to relegate all that to the past in the hope that voters, especially voters who are parents or workers in public education, will become convinced that the government’s very public and disturbingly cavalier attitude toward the management of public education was a momentary blunder in political judgment.
There is actual work to be done, and that work might take more than just the 36 days the legislature sat last year or the 200 days it went without a session at all.
The last thing government will need leading up to the 2017 election is more trouble from the badly broken relationship with the teachers, so Peter Fassbender is out and Bernier is in with directions from the premier herself to “rebuild relationships.”
But trouble already looms for those rebuilt relationships.
The province has until the end of August to decide whether it will respond to the BC Teachers’ Federation’s appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, which it hopes will overturn the decision by the B.C. Court of Appeal that the government did not violate teachers’ charter rights when, in 2002, it stripped them of the ability to bargain class size and composition.
The nature of the response by government to the teachers’ appeal over an issue that is at the core of the 2014 labour-relations debacle will be influential in Bernier’s ability to “rebuild relationships.”
That will take a serious commitment on the part of government, the cabinet and the premier to making any kind of rebuilt relationship work.
It will require that all convenient doorways to exiting the new relationship remain firmly closed. No more dramatic moves on either side that cost the kids their education or parents their rights to that education. No more bull-headed strike situations created by intransigence on both sides, no more lockouts, no more ill-advised $40-per-day games.
The relationship between government and the teachers will need to be detoxified, if such a thing is possible after so long. No more name-calling, finger-pointing, “they are just in it for the money” accusations about teachers from government. No more describing school principals and school district administrators as “low-hanging fruit.” No more angry outbursts from BCTF leadership, which has been elected to lead teachers wisely, not lead the province into the next election.
Both sides, under the leadership of Bernier and whoever the BCTF brings forth, need to make an effort to understand and even express some appreciation for the world of the other.
Understanding does not imply agreement or even the possibility of agreement, but it does suggest that each side respects at least some of the reasons the other side holds to its position.
Lastly, it might be time for both government and the BCTF to focus on their future in terms of a respectful relationship that would be of benefit not just to themselves and their own interests and agendas, but to the 500,000 kids for whom they both bear a substantial responsibility.
OK, I’ve been called an optimistic idealist before. But some optimism is going to be needed if Bernier has any chance to accomplish his assigned task. •
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
