Clark's press conference bad news for province's court prospects

The tit-for-tat press conferences by Premier Christy Clark and BCTF head Jim Iker did nothing to advance negotiations, and left most people appalled by both sides.

But Clark’s comments seem especially damaging to the government’s long-term interests.

Assume the union holds out and the government legislates teachers back to work and imposes a new contract. 

Teachers would then challenge the agreement in court, pointing to the failure to negotiate class size and composition issues, as the B.C. Supreme Court has said it must. 

The court didn’t say the provisions, stripped in 2002, must be restored to the contract. But it said there must be good-faith bargaining. (And compensation for the damage done.)

A transcript of Clark’s press conference will be very helpful for the union cause.

Clark said the government would not begin bargaining on class composition until the BCTF reduces its wage and benefit proposals and an agreement was in place on those issues. She didn’t even acknowledge class-size limits as a topic for negotiation.

Clark’s comments indicated the government has made no serious effort to bargain the contentious issues, or address the B.C. Supreme Court ruling that class size and composition issues had been illegally stripped from the contract.

Her public insistence on preconditions before any real negotiation on the issues  makes a strong case that the government has not yet accepted the court ruling - or learned how to avoid another court loss.

It will weaken the government's ability to defend an imposed contract from a new legal challenge.

Footnote: The issue isn't complex. The teachers' union had successfully bargained to have class size and composition limits in contracts. (Composition refers to the number of special needs students in a class.) 

In 2001, the newly elected Liberals thought the limits were too restrictive, costly and properly a matter of education policy. 

So they passed laws in 2002 to strip them from the contract and bar the union from negotiating the issues in future.

The Liberals had a point. Class sizes are matter of education policy, which should be the responsibility of school trustees and MLAs.

But a sensible government would recognize they are also an issue of working conditions. Unions negotiate working conditions. There needs to be some balancing of interests, or at least a good-faith attempt.

The Supreme Court agreed. And it found the law violated the teachers’ rights. They had, presumably, traded off other items in past negotiations to get the clauses in the contracts. Government can not just pass laws to violate agreements without consequences. (The Liberals have accepted this principle in other areas. When it retroactively banned uranium mining, the government agreed to pay more than $30-million to Boss Uranium, recognizing there is a cost to ripping up legal agreements.) 

Teachers' dispute down to public pressure and first to fold

You can tune out all the rhetoric from both sides in the teachers’ dispute at this point. 

It has come down to a simple question - who will fold first.

The government hopes the BCTF will accept a negotiated deal, to avoid - or reduce - the risk of legal challenges. Given its losing record in the courts, that’s understandable.

The union would rather be legislated back if an acceptable deal can’t be reached, for the same reason. (The union leadership, after taking members out in a costly, ineffective strike strategy, also doesn’t really want to try and explain why the result was a mediocre negotiated settlement.)

So they are hunkered down, blaming each other and trying to rally support for their cause.

The government’s brave rhetoric about letting the strike/lockout continue is empty. Parents and the public won’t tolerate a government that fails to use its power to re-open schools. Especially given Premier Christy Clark’s past claims that education is an essential service.

But the Liberals hope the BCTF will cave before it has to legislate an end to the strike. Teachers lose, on average, about $1,700 a week in gross pay as the strike continues. They are already out $3,500-plus, with the losses mounting by the day. And they know that any settlement is not going to recover those losses.

Teacher support for the strike is fading, according to columnist Bill Tieleman. His piece in The Tyee argued that the union should continue the strike. One reason, he said, was that if the BCTF called a pause in the strike members would refuse to go back to the picket lines.

So parents and students wait, the parties wage a PR war and the schools stay closed.

What is most irritating is that the union and government have had five or six years to act on sound proposals to improve this hopelessly flawed bargaining process, but have done nothing.