Save the school year
There’s something the provincial government can do — right now — while waiting to see if a teachers’ strike has put the school year in jeopardy for almost 70,000 Ontario high school students. Officials can start drafting back-to-work legislation and the Liberals can begin reaching out to opposition parties in case they do decide to force teachers to return to class.
Premier Kathleen Wynne has expressed willingness to impose legislation, but at the right time, once an arm’s-length commission has determined that the school year is at risk. She has little choice but to wait for that verdict, despite understandable worry from anxious students and parents concerned about losing vital class time.
It would be unseemly for the government to cast aside due process and simply charge forward with legislation suspending workers’ right to strike.
That said, the province’s Education Relations Commission is coming to a decision. The four-member panel was asked last week to assess the impact of teachers’ walkouts. A strike has dragged on for five weeks in Durham while job action has been underway for four weeks in Sudbury District, and for three weeks in Peel.
With only about a month remaining before the scheduled end of the school term, the point at which the academic year is “lost” seems imminent.
If the commission does decide that the school year is in jeopardy, Queen’s Park needs to be ready to act as quickly as possible. If the year has officially been deemed at risk, such government intervention would warrant all-party support in the legislature. It would be a shame if opposition obstruction kept kids from class any longer than absolutely necessary.
Another adjudication process underway with potential to affect the strike is an Ontario Labour Relations Board hearing into the legality of teachers’ walkouts at the local level. This issue centres on a two-tier bargaining system introduced last year. Big-ticket items, including wages and class size, are supposed to be negotiated province-wide at a central table. Smaller, non-monetary issues such as local working conditions are meant to be handled in talks with individual school boards.
Ontario’s three strike-hit boards went to the labour relations panel last week seeking an “urgent” decision, arguing that the teachers’ walkout was illegal because it had little to do with local issues and was actually meant to sway provincial bargaining.
After devoting several days to hearing legal arguments, labour board chair Bernard Fishbein announced that a report would be released “sometime in the middle of next week.” Again, this doesn’t reflect the sense of urgency shared by students blocked from school and by parents concerned about their children’s education.
In the labour board’s defence, the issue at stake here is far more tangled than whether or not the academic year is at risk. The School Boards Collective Bargaining Act seems ambiguous about whether teachers can legally launch job actions at the local level to press issues at the central table. School board lawyers were forced to argue that the law meant to ban such strikes, even if it didn’t clearly say so.
No wonder the labour relations board is moving carefully to pick through this, especially since its verdict could figure in future such disputes.
Queen’s Park should clarify this legislation, amending existing rules to eliminate the ambiguity. Beyond that, it should re-evaluate the entire two-tier bargaining approach. With strikes interrupting the education of thousands of Ontario students, results of the system’s first year in operation hardly inspire confidence that the government has got this right.