Unions must prove expenses
Province to put $2.5M payout for unions’ bargaining costs on hold until paperwork arrives
Teachers won’t get strings-free cash to cover bargaining, Wynne says,
Ontario teacher unions have agreed to provide receipts for the controversial $2.5-million payout from the province to help cover bargaining costs, a demand Premier Kathleen Wynne announced Wednesday just days after the education minister came under fire for saying no accounting of the funds was needed.
Wynne’s move — along with news the money had not yet flowed to the three teachers unions — stunned the Legislature.
“The teachers’ unions will be required to provide an accounting before the money flows so it will be clear exactly how the costs were incurred,” the premier said under questioning from the Progressive Conservatives.
The high school teachers union told the Star Wynne’s move came as no surprise.
“When we went through this in 2008 and again in 2012, the president had to sign an attestation (as to how the funds were spent) . . . we had to give a full accounting and a full report was provided — and we expected this would happen this time around,” said Paul Elliott, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation.
In the past, the union has submitted not just receipts, but travel and accommodation details, names of those at the bargaining table each day and how many hours they spent negotiating, as well as what happened during talks that day.
Elliott said the $1-million payout won’t cover all the union’s bargaining costs — “it just flat-out doesn’t” — because the tab is already $1.3 million and expenses are still coming in.
While the union has a ratified deal with the province for its teachers, “we’re still negotiating for support staff ” represented by OSSTF in boards scattered across all four public systems — public, Catholic, French and French Catholic — “and it’s a massive undertaking when you are talking about central deals” for 60,000 teachers and15,000 staff, that include executive and local leaders plus negotiators, Elliott said.
“It adds up quickly,” and it’s possible that a bump in union dues will be needed to cover the bills, he added. The premier said the $2.5 million is part of the government’s “net-zero” requirement — meaning it has been offset by cuts within the contract. However, it is unclear if that is actually the case.
Wynne told the Legislature the funds “didn’t come from the classroom . . . (and) didn’t come from programs for students . . . That money came out of the overall compensation package, those are the kinds of examples because sick leave, retirement gratuities — that’s all part of the compensation packages of teachers.”
Ann Hawkins, president of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association, said the money for her union is not “net zero” and that the contract it negotiated was completed before the $1 million was agreed to. While it has not taken such funds in the past, she said providing proof of how they were spent is “no problem.”
Elliott said he believes the funds are not “net zero,” though he was unsure how the government is accounting for the money.
Both he and Hawkins said information about the payouts was given to members weeks ago, and Elliott said members did question it during ratification meetings.
Both union leaders disputed accusations that the money was a bribe for labour peace or to support the Liberals, noting they also donated to other parties. Elliott said OSSTF, in fact, gave “significantly more” to the NDP in the last election than it gave to the Liberals.
In total, the Ontario government has promised $1 million each to the OSSTF and Catholic teachers, as well as $500,000 to the much smaller union, AEFO, representing the province’s French-board teachers.
More funds are expected to be doled out when a deal is reachedwith support staff, who are members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees. CUPE accepted similar payments in negotiations in 2008 and 2012 — $461,000 in total.
The union representing elementary teachers says it will not accept such a payout, and according to records provided by the ministry of education, also did not in contract talks in 2008 and 2012.
The Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario is the only teacher union not to have reached a settlement with the province and school boards, but continues to negotiate. The Premier has said if ETFO and support staff don’t have tentative deals by Nov. 1, their pay could be docked.
On Tuesday, the Conservatives asked the auditor general to probe the payouts to the unions, and Wednesday questioned if such payments are even allowed under the Labour Act.
On top of the $2.5 million going to teacher unions, an additional $4.6 million will be handed to school boards to cover bargaining costs.
Premier Kathleen Wynne, take note: this is what comes from ignoring repeated calls over several years to tighten Ontario’s loose election rules. It’s the smell of scandal.
The province’s ill-advised practice of giving secret payouts to teachers’ unions, supposedly to offset the cost of bargaining, is wrong on multiple counts. It gives labour an incentive to drag out contract talks and it squanders taxpayers’ money that could be better spent elsewhere.
Furthermore, the government’s response has been hopelessly bungled. Education Minister Liz Sandals had earlier indicated that funds were doled out — by the million — without any invoice or other evidence of actual costs incurred by the unions. It was ostensibly to cover bargaining expenses with no receipts required because, as Sandals explained, the government knew the cost of such things as hotel rooms and pizza. This smacked of shoddy accounting, at best.
Wynne stood up in the legislature and performed some muchneeded damage control on Wednesday, saying the money hasn’t yet been paid to the unions and that they’ll need to provide proper records after all. Fair enough, but the premier needs to go further.
A nagging suspicion remains in some quarters that the Liberal government quietly made these payments to support the labour movement’s antiConservative third-party election ads and political donations by teachers’ unions. Both the Wynne administration and the unions have adamantly denied that there was any such intent.
The money involved is considerable. Unions representing Ontario’s high school teachers and Catholic school teachers were each awarded $1 million in their latest collective agreement. A smaller union representing the province’s French teachers got $500,000. Similar payments have gone on for years.
A look at campaign finance disclosures for 2014 indicates that unions representing high school teachers and teachers in the Catholic system spent well over $3 million on various electionrelated activities, including to fund a blatantly anti-Conservative coalition group called Working Families.
This pattern of government payouts and election spending by labour readily gives rise to a perception — however unfair — that public money may have been spent in an effort to tilt the outcome of a provincial election.
It’s a shocking thing to consider. And people wouldn’t be pondering it at all if Wynne had listened to Chief Electoral Officer Greg Essensa and other concerned voices calling for election reform.
Two years ago, Essensa urged the province to set up an independent body to draft ways of limiting spending on election ads by third-party interest groups, including unions. He was worried that unfettered campaigning by such organizations had reached a point that it was unhealthy for democracy.
Essensa reiterated that concern in March in a report warning that third-party advertising had increased by more than 400 per cent since 2007, totalling almost $9 million for the 2014 provincial election. That wouldn’t be allowed at the federal level, where there are strict limits on what such groups can spend. Indeed, Ontario is the only jurisdiction in Canada that regulates third parties but doesn’t restrain their spending on political ads.
In the wake of Essensa’s report, Wynne promised to bring in new regulations limiting third-party ads during campaigns, but the same old rules remain in force. Now is the time to deliver on that pledge and ensure that no future government will be tainted by the suspicion of unfairly funding lavish third-party campaigns.
Wynne would also do well to ban corporate and union election contributions, as both Toronto and the federal government have done. Had she already delivered on these reforms it would be harder to accuse her administration of issuing politically motivated payouts to the teachers’ unions.
In the interest of boosting public confidence in her government’s impartiality, and to serve democratic principle, Wynne should enact these reforms with all urgency.
Premier Wynne would do well to ban corporate and union election contributions