If Ontario’s Liberal government secretly gave some teacher unions millions of taxpayer dollars so these unions could use that money at election time to buy advertising attacking the Liberals’ main political opponents, everyone would know it was wrong.

The Ontario Liberals and the teacher unions involved insist that isn’t what they’ve been doing.

That there is no “quid pro quo” between what they claim are two unrelated events.

First, that the Liberal government has given some Ontario teacher unions millions of tax dollars to, it says, help them defray the costs of negotiating new teacher contracts with the government.

Second, that the teacher unions spend millions of dollars attacking the Liberals’ main political opponents during elections, the Progressive Conservatives and whoever their leader happens to be at election time.

Liberals, their media shills and the teacher unions involved say any suggestion these two events are related is outrageous and offensive.

Nonsense. A reasonable person might well conclude the two sides have arrived at a, “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” arrangement, greased by taxpayers’ money.

That said, we’re not arguing that what’s been going on — which we now learn also involves multi-million-dollar payouts to school boards by the government for their negotiating expenses — is illegal.

We’re saying it should be illegal.

In politics, individuals and organizations negotiating with the government for the spending of billions of provincial tax dollars must not only avoid actual conflicts of interest, they must avoid any appearance of conflicts of interest.

Anyone who doesn’t see the appearance of a conflict of interest in what’s been going on here is either obtuse or a Liberal MPP.

Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government has been all over the map trying to defend the indefensible.

With one breath it insists the payouts were necessary due to the complicated, two-tier teacher bargaining bureaucracy the Liberals themselves created.

With the next, it lectures the Progressive Conservatives that they did the same thing when they were in power, forgetting to mention the teacher unions were also attacking the PCs back then.

The solution here is simple — legislation making it illegal for any provincial government to pay any of the negotiating expenses of any union or any other agency it deals with.