Students the victims in Ont. colleges strike

Everything that is wrong and unjust with public-sector strikes has been demonstrated by the labour dispute between the College Employer Council and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union.

For five weeks, the longest college strike in Ontario’s history, 500,000 students who paid their college tuitions in good faith have been held hostage by a labour dispute they played no part in creating.

In the private sector, if one company experiences a strike or locks out its workers, its competitors can supply the good or service in question to the public.

But there is no private sector alternative available to these students.

The prospect of the Ontario government passing back-to-work legislation — which often happens in the public sector when no negotiated resolution is in the offing — also became an impediment to achieving a settlement here.

There was no incentive for college faculty to settle — with 86 per cent of the 12,000 who participated last week in a forced vote rejecting the offer.

That’s because of the expectation the province would intervene with back-towork legislation if teachers — who were advised to reject the offer by their union — turned it down.

Their reasoning was that arbitrators tend to give out more generous awards than negotiated labour contracts, so why settle?

In the wake of the rejected offer, both sides resumed negotiating briefly after meeting with Premier Kathleen Wynne, then told her they remained at an impasse.

That prompted Wynne to announce she would introduce emergency back-towork legislation aimed at reopening the colleges today.

While we’re pleased the end of the strike is now in sight, students have been ill-served by the entire process.

The school year will now be “saved” because it has to be, by such methods as adding extra teaching days and shedding curriculum that was supposed to be taught, again robbing students of the education they paid for.

This is yet another example of how the outdated, adversarial relationship between management and labour in the public sector ill serves the public.

Unfortunately, Wynne, who started her political career as a left-wing Toronto school trustee and who covets the favour of public sector unions in return for their support in elections, is not the premier who will change it.