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Teaching jobs are so scarce that graduates are looking to Australia or the UK, where the grass is greener. British schools have jobs available because the conditions aren’t nearly as attractive as in Canada. British recruiters are actively seeking to sign up frustrated Ontario graduates.

The reason teaching is so popular is simple: it’s a good job with excellent pay and attractive benefits. Yet, faced with an oversupplied market, a glut of jobless graduates, and a provincial government with a $12.5 billion deficit and a self-appointed deadline to balance the books, Ontario’s teachers unions have surveyed the situation and reached the least sensible of possible conclusions: they’re complaining loudly about poor treatment and demanding members authorize the right to call a strike unless the province offers improvements.

In any other profession – sorry, scratch that. In any profession outside the public sector, this would be deemed so nutty as to raise serious doubts about the mental faculties of those in charge. When you have a group of employees lucky enough to have attractive jobs in tough conditions, and with thousands of eager young replacements eager to take their place, the last thing you want is to poke a stick in the eye of the institution that supplies those jobs and benefits. But these are teachers’ unions, remember.

The unions are talking strike because they’re still mad at the heavy-handed tactics used by former premier Dalton McGuinty in the last bargaining period. McGuinty froze wages in a take-it-or-leave it confrontation that sparked protests and rotating strikes. His successor, Kathleen Wynne, re-opened contracts and spent $468 million to ensure union support prior to last spring’s election, but that’s not good enough for the unions. The 76,000 members of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario voted 95 per cent in favour of a strike mandate last month, prompting union president Sam Hammond to proclaim that members had “sent a powerful message that they will not stand for a repeat of the last round of bargaining involving contract strips and unconstitutional legislation removing our bargaining rights.” The Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association is urging members to give it a similarly strong mandate in an upcoming vote.