FACE TO FACE: Does the BC Liberals' net-zero mandate make economic sense?
Remember the 1990s expression "Talk to the hand"?
It was Bart Simpson's favourite way of saying, "I refuse to listen to whatever it is you're saying, so you may as well shut up."
That's what the B.C. government's net-zero mandate is: a disrespectful, Bart Simpson-esque, talk-to-the-hand refusal to bargain.
Net-zero - or its respectable name, Mandate 2010 - is the right's best let-'em-eat-cake excuse since trickle down economics, which has lost plausibility everywhere but in U.S. red states, Alberta and the mind of one Face to Face columnist.
Net-zero is not actually a bargaining strategy but a political strategy, and it has served our anti-labour BC Liberal government well.
Convincing a pummelled working class that other workers are the problem has worked. It has divided workers, encouraging them to work to lower the lot of public sector workers rather than to improve the lot of private sector workers. It encourages a proverbial race to the bottom.
And pitting private against public sector workers deflects attention from our real fiscal problem, the crippling removal of billions from tax revenues in the 2002 tax cuts for the rich.
How effective has net-zero been?
Teachers went to 76 "bargaining" sessions and were told 76 times to talk to the hand. They watched a vindictive back-to-work Bill 22 remove their right to political action.
The BC Liberals then upped the ante, appointing an non-objective third-party mediator armed with a freshly minted law that mandated him to do nothing but - guess what - have teachers talk to the hand.
Teachers knew that settling for nothing now would pre-empt threatened back-to-work legislation containing God knows what kind of retribution, so they agreed to accept more education cuts and no money.
And yet teachers are accused of not being willing to bargain.
That's how well net-zero has worked for this BC Liberal government.
In fact, net-zero has worked so well in punishing workers that I'm hoping the government expands the program and adopts a net-zero policy when speaking about tax cuts for the rich. Had the Libs told the rich to talk to the hand in 2002, B.C. would have saved $3.4 billion.
Face to Face columnist Jim Nelson is a retired Tri-City teacher and principal who lives in Port Moody. He has contributed a number of columns on education-related issues to The Tri-City News.
