We grade the players in the colleges strike
After five weeks of strike action at Ontario’s community colleges — and with students not quite back in class yet — it’s time for a report card:
AThe community mark we college allot Ontario’s students, 500,000 many of whom struggled valiantly to keep up their studies as their instructors and managers bickered. At Algonquin College, students who had been instructed to shut down their newspaper created a digital alternative. Other students put together an online petition to end the labour dispute, and still others are launching a class-action lawsuit over their missed instruction. It all adds up to real-life learning. Good for them.
D–Premier Kathleen gets a bare Wynne’s pass, but government only because it has finally moved to end the strike. True, governments shouldn’t immediately intervene in labour strife (PC Leader Patrick Brown said he would have brought the sides together more quickly — but how?); still, Wynne could have used moral suasion much earlier to try to broker dialogue.
FUnion members reacted with unmitigated glee to the results of this week’s vote rejecting management’s final offer, thus undercutting OPSEU’s rhetoric about striking have for the had sake good of the reason students. to reject The the union offer may — we sympathize with at least some of its demands — but celebrating the fact that students might well lose their term, at a moment when professors should have been genuinely sorrowful at this possibility, showed where their interests actually lie.
FThe College Employer Council fares no better, seemingly in our deaf assessment. ear to legitimate It turned worries: a how classroom teaching standards are set, and how to ensure part-time instructors are brought into the full-time fold when it makes sense. Unusually, the union has said money wasn’t the top issue in the dispute; these more difficult principles were. The public saw little commitment to finding solutions to them.
F–If to we the could NDP’s assign Andrea a lower Horwath, mark we would. After weeks of not interfering in the dispute, government was finally in a position Thursday to pass back-to-work legislation. But Horwarth’s party has been standing in the way, simply to shore up its labour credentials. students Kick As of these this will folks writing, be back out it’s of in school not class. clear What altogether. exactly is clear when is almost everyone needs remedial training in real life. We don’t want the system to fail again.