Premier Kathleen Wynne handed $468 million back to teachers last year when she watered down a wage-freeze law her predecessor Dalton McGuinty imposed, Ontario’s auditor general says.

“That is the total,” Bonnie Lysyk said Wednesday after releasing a long-awaited special report into 2012 legislation that Wynne repealed, allowing her then-minority government to re-open contracts with teacher unions furious at the cuts.

The $468 million – which ate into the $2.4 billion in savings originally estimated from Bill 115 — came in new deals with several unions for “benefits, salaries and wages . . . something I view as taken directly out of the classrooms,” said Progressive Conservative MPP Lisa MacLeod.

She said Wynne had last June’s province-wide vote in mind and used taxpayer money to bring teacher unions back into the Liberal fold after McGuinty alienated them.

“Kathleen Wynne wanted to consolidate a voting bloc of hers before an election,” MacLeod said.

Education Minister Liz Sandals — who said in April 2013 that a revised deal with high school teachers “is not going to cost taxpayers one dollar more than when we started” — walked away from reporters asking about the $468 million in foregone savings when the government is trying to eliminate a $12.5-billion deficit.

“I think that’s a very odd question . . . I think it is a good news story,” she said in reference to Lysyk’s finding that the Liberal government was “reasonable” in its estimates of cost savings for the bill covering the two-year period from 2012 to 2014.

“All our calculations were reasonable given the information we had at the time.”

Lysyk said the extra costs to bolster the deals with teachers are separate, and include more paid sick days for teachers and school support staff, boosting maternity benefits and eliminating wage gaps between teachers in different unions, among other things.

“There’s always going to be costs associated with reopening agreements.”

The auditor also pointed out there may be more costs in the form of a Charter of Rights challenge by several unions that remains before the courts and won’t be heard until April.

“It’s something to think about . . . depending on how the courts decide.”

New Democrat MPP Peter Tabuns didn’t quarrel with the extra $468 million cost, saying the Liberals were wrong to force the original deal on teachers and risk a constitutional challenge.

“They’re in danger of having that go against them.”

MacLeod pushed for Lysyk’s audit in the legislature’s estimates committee after Wynne took over from McGuinty in February 2013 and repealed the bill to make peace with teachers unions at a time of unrest in schools.

Some teachers refused to do extracurricular activities such as sports teams and clubs while others staged one-day strikes, leaving parents and children caught in a battle between the government and unions.

When asked last year if improved contracts were worth the clash, Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario president Sam Hammond replied, “absolutely.”

When it was passed, the bill froze wages for two years — except for movement up through the grid for younger teachers as they gained experience — in exchange for three unpaid days off, halving the number of sick days to 10 annually and a ban on cashing them out upon retirement.

It was based on a similar deal signed by the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association.

McGuinty, who boasted at the time he had increased teachers’ compensation by 25 per cent since 2004, said the government had no choice but to belt-tighten.

The bill was forced through the legislature with support from the Conservatives when McGuinty called MPPs back early from their summer recess in August 2012 before crucial byelections the minority Liberal government hoped would inch it over the line to a majority.

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New Democrats voted against the law, known as Bill 115 or the Putting Students First Act, and in those byelections captured the longtime Conservative riding of Kitchener-Waterloo that the Liberals had hoped to gain.

Weeks later, McGuinty announced his resignation with the legislature in a furor over his decision to cancel two gas-fired power plants before the 2011 election.

The OPP continues to investigate the deletion of politically sensitive emails and documents involving those cancellations.

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