OTTAWA—A controversial bill to freeze teacher wages and slash sick days will not be a confidence vote that could topple Ontario’s minority Liberal government, says Premier Dalton McGuinty.

A late August date for an early recall of the legislature to deal with the looming crisis could be revealed next week after McGuinty gauges how tough a stand the NDP and Progressive Conservative opposition will take.

Meanwhile, the premier urged teachers and school boards to embrace the government’s proposals in the two weeks before school starts, avoiding strikes or lockouts.

“We’re telling teachers and trustees it’s important to come together . . . I know it’s the summer,” McGuinty told reporters after touring newly renovated full-day kindergarten classes in Ottawa’s south end.

“There is some room for some modest adjustment based on local bargaining, but not a lot because there’s just not the kind of money we used to have. It’s as simple as that.”

McGuinty, who styles himself as the “education premier,” called the bill a “fair, balanced, responsible” approach given a $14.8-billion deficit he plans to eliminate in five years.

“We can’t afford to give pay hikes to teachers or doctors or nurses or any of the 1.3 million public-sector workers, not right now. They’ve all had reasonable, responsible pay hikes during the course of the last nine years.”

Although the bill is key to implementing that plan, McGuinty is clearly unwilling to put his government on the line over it, saying it would not be a vote of “confidence” for him.

“I think fundamentally it’s about the confidence that parents need to have knowing that schools will be open, teachers will be there, the adults will have gotten their act together.”

At Queen’s Park, Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak urged McGuinty to recall the legislature “immediately” to deal with the teacher bill but wouldn’t say if his party would support it.

“We want to see if there are teeth in the bill . . . so you can actually enforce a pay freeze,” Hudak said, noting the Liberal government had supposedly frozen the pay of civil service managers until it was revealed this week that 98 per cent of them got bonus pay last year, sharing a pot of almost $36 million.

“We’ll be practical about this,” he added, calling for a legislated pay freeze for all public sector workers. “We’re not going to let unions off the hook.”

New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath said she remains worried the bill could be overturned by the courts and charged McGuinty’s focus on teachers is cynically timed to mine anti-teacher sentiment among voters in Sept. 6 byelections in Vaughan and Kitchener—Waterloo.

“This whole initiative is more about seats in the legislature than it is about kids in the classroom.”

Automatic pay hikes for teachers totaling $473 million kick in Aug. 31 if new collective agreements aren’t reached, but the Liberal bill, if passed, would claw back those gains.

Unions representing about 55,000 Catholic and francophone teachers have already accepted deals containing a wage freeze and reductions in sick days that can be banked and paid out before retirement.

Touring St. Luke Elementary School , McGuinty scribbled a welcome message to students in pink chalk. Asked if he was optimistic they’d have a school year, he responded: “Oh, they’re gonna have a year.”

The bill, unveiled Thursday by Education Minister Laurel Broten, includes incentives for settling by the end of August, including more flexibility for local solutions to find savings. If agreements are not reached by Dec. 31, the province could move to impose deals.

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Broten denied misleading Ontarians by saying deals are needed to avoid strikes or lockouts, saying unions are taking strike votes.

But the unions representing elementary and high school teachers say they are not planning to strike, and that they wouldn’t be in a legal position to do so for some time anyway.

“We have continually reinforced the concept that (striking) is absolutely not the case,” said Ken Coran, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation.

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