A few bucks for Wynne’s buddies

Back in August, Ontario learned that its Liberal government and several of its teachers’ unions had just about settled their latest marathon contract dispute. Teachers would get a one per cent lump sum payment in September, plus a one per cent raise the following year, plus another half per cent after that, plus improved sick leave and benefits, all at a net-zero cost to the government. Education Minister Liz Sandals confirmed that “any salary increases [would be] offset in other areas within the collective agreement,” though declined to say where, exactly, it found the money.

“What I want to make absolutely clear is that we have not changed class size,” she said, and left it at that. At the time, it was reasonable to infer that something else was being cut to finance teachers’ raises, but Ontario’s government was content to tell taxpayers and parents that the specifics were none of their business.

And they would have stuck to that position had the Globe and Mail not published the details of the confidential 42-page agreement with the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation from August. According to the document, the added funds came from two sources: an amendment to the process for cashing in sick days, which will allow teachers to cash in some of their sick days next year, as opposed to when they retire, at a reduced rate, as well as funds that were supposed to go toward a program to prevent at-risk students from dropping out of school. It’s that latter source of new teacher revenue that has many Ontarians justifiably upset.

That said, it would be incorrect to say that the government raided a fund for vulnerable kids expressly to feed teachers more money. What in fact happened was that the Liberals stopped supplying the program with additional funds in 2012, the fourth year of its five-year commitment, and is now using the $20 million or so saved to finance OSSTF raises. The official explanation, according to Education Minister Liz Sandals, is that by 2012, the program had hired enough staff. OK, fair enough — but why not invest that money in students, as originally intended, instead of teachers?

As if that’s not enough, the docu- ment revealed another bombshell: the government had paid the OSSTF $1 million to “offset the cost of central collective bargaining.” (By Thursday morning, various sources had confirmed that the union representing Ontario’s English Catholic teachers also received $1 million, and the union representing Ontario’s French teachers received $500,000.) To be clear, that is $1 million of taxpayer money to a union that collects fees for the explicit purpose of collective bargaining, all because, according to Sandals, the government’s new, centralized bargaining process made talks more difficult, and this round of bargaining “has been an unusually dragged out process.”

Yet at the same time, Sandals undermined the notion that these payments were somehow extraordinary, saying that the government has, for the last decade, paid both unions and boards for negotiating costs.

That much is believable; this government has indeed garnered quite a reputation for paying off unions when things get hairy. It happened, for example, back in 2013, shortly after Kathleen Wynne took over from Dalton McGuinty. The Wynne government had previously stated that there was no money for teachers’ raises,

Ontario, which just slashed pay rates for doctors, keeps finding millions here

and there to gift to teachers unions