The Editor,
Re. "BCPSEA offers 'correction' on Bill 28 ruling" (Letters, The Tri-City News, Feb. 10).
Writing on behalf of the BC Public School Employers' Association, Melanie Joy attempts to depict her organization as being autonomous and not, as an earlier letter stated, "a puppet of the government."
Based on teachers' experience, that's exactly the role that BCPSEA has played since 2002, when the government brought in legislation to strip class-size and composition protections from our collective agreement.
The BC Teachers' Federation successfully challenged that legislation, which the B.C. Supreme Court found to be unconstitutional and invalid. Judge Susan Griffin's 103-page decision is not, as Ms. Joy states, "largely based on its finding that the BCTF was not consulted properly prior to the legislation being enacted." Rather, the decision is clear that the government with the help of BCPSEA, removed hundreds of provisions that ensured smaller class sizes and extensive supports for students with special needs. The decision was also clear that the legislation was unconstitutional because it took away rights that were freely bargained and protected under the Charter.
Justice Griffin's decision relies on extensive evidence that government and BCPSEA shared information to shape the bargaining strategy. She writes:
" [183] Rather, the evidence leads to the conclusion that BCPSEA knew, during the 2001 collective bargaining process, that there was a good possibility that the new government would enact legislation that BCPSEA would consider favourable to it, and that could affect the collective bargaining between it and BCTF on class size and composition and non-enrolling ratios. As such, it was likely that BCPSEA had no motivation to compromise in its collective bargaining with BCTF on these issues. Given what BCPSEA knew, it is likely that it was taking very hard positions in the bargaining. This most likely was a key contributing factor for the lack of progress in collective bargaining in 2001."
It appears that history may well be repeating itself, with BCPSEA taking "non-negotiable" positions for the past year at the bargaining table, and with Education Minister George Abbott and Premier Christy Clark now issuing warnings about additional legislation imposing a contract.
It is disingenuous in the extreme for Ms. Joy to take umbrage at a letter to the editor she knows related a very accurate summary of this history.
Susan Lambert, President, BC Teachers' Federation
