The Ontario government has quietly agreed to pay as much as $31 million to the province’s Catholic teachers who won a grievance over a delay to their salary grid increases during protracted contract negotiations.

About 40 per cent of members of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association will receive $2,000 each under the deal reached last month.

Although final numbers need to be worked out, roughly 10,000-12,000 teachers could benefit — most of them with less than 10 years on the job who hadn’t reached the top salary available to them on the grid.

Other teacher unions are livid over the Liberals’ provincial payout.

Harvey Bischof, head of the province’s public secondary teachers, called it “a dirty deal.”

Sam Hammond, president of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, said it’s “outrageous.”

“The $31 million payout that the Liberal government made to OECTA is not about grievances at all,” Hammond, who heads the country’s largest teacher union, adding other smaller education unions are also receiving similar reparations.

“Payments were made to organizations that had no grievances. It is outrageous and has no legitimate basis.”

The Catholic teachers’ union was upset when the 2014-15 school year started without a contract, with the government extending existing agreements as negotiations remained underway.

However, those agreements were a continuation of the contentious 2012 deal, where Catholic teachers actually agreed to a salary grid delay, as well as other concessions that were ultimately imposed on other teacher unions that failed to reach deals with the Liberal government under then-premier Dalton McGuinty.

OECTA later filed grievances about the 97-day salary grid delay in 2014 with each of its 29 school boards in Ontario, winning an initial decision in Waterloo last year.

That decision did not specify a remedy, but ordered the local union and board to figure it out.

OECTA then met with the Liberal government to find a solution.

“The same grievance was filed with every Catholic school board across the province,” said OECTA President Liz Stuart in a statement to the Star.

“The Waterloo decision set the precedent for all the other grievances. We avoided the needless duplication and legal fees of arbitrating the same grievance in 28 different boards by negotiating the settlement for all the same grievances at the same time, which is a common practice.”

(Salary grids are based on education and experience, and teachers move “up” it as they build years of service. Annual salary increases boost the grid overall.)

News of the payout to Catholic teachers has caused some controversy on social media, with other teacher union members — still smarting over OECTA’s concessions in 2012 that they were ultimately saddled with — wondering how a deal the Catholic teachers’ agreed to could be grieved.

“This grievance relates to the 2014-15 school year and the government’s decision to extend a provision that delayed grid movement of some of our members beyond what had been negotiated” in the previous contract, Stuart also said.

“The grievance proved that the school boards’ actions in delaying the grid movement were illegal — actions that were a result of the government denying the necessary salary funds to the school boards.”

Education Ministry spokesperson Ingrid Anderson said “discussions have been ongoing since (the Waterloo arbitrator’s) ruling in March 2017 however, the government attempted to resolve remedy with all applicants first and as such the settlement with OECTA concluded last month.

“The total cost of the settlement is approximately $31 million.”

Bischof, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, said he has “no objection to OECTA pursuing its members interests in this matter” but said “it was the government that was engaged in double dealing” because it did not allow other teacher unions to pursue such repayment.

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Last year, his union agreed to a $50 million settlement over the contract that was imposed on his 60,000 members back in 2012, to cover the loss of banking sick days as well as a delay in salary increases from 2012-14 after a Superior Court ruling that found Bill 115 — that imposed the cuts and contracts — was unconstitutional.

The elementary teachers’ union is still working out a remedy to Bill 115, that at the time sparked massive teacher unrest including strikes and cancelling extracurricular activities.

OECTA was not a part of those labour board talks, given it was the only teacher union to agree to a contract with the government of the day.

“They did not have access to such a settlement,” Bischof said. “Instead, the government seems to be claiming they are getting recompense for the 2014-15 grid delay, supposedly as a result of one local arbitral decision.

“We, on the other hand, were told that we had to abandon our grievances for that (2014-15) year in order to get to that first agreement under the School Boards Collective Bargaining Act.”

He said OECTA “was treated differently,” and called the payout from the government to the Catholic teachers a “dirty deal.”

“We were told by the government that there was no way they were going back to restore the grid for that year that had passed,” he said, so his union dropped all related grievances for that 2014 year.

OECTA, however, was allowed to grieve, and Bischof accused the government of “setting up the opportunity to square up with OECTA.”

However, Anderson said “the parties at the various bargaining tables had different priorities in their negotiations and therefore arrived at different agreements.”

She also noted that the elementary teachers’ have yet to resolve their Bill 115 remedy and the union “has indicated that it will be returning to court, so we are unable to comment further on that process at this time.

“We remain committed to working with our education partners to build upon the gains we have made in Ontario’s publicly-funded education system and to continue to give students the best educational experience possible,” she also said in her statement to the Star.

But Hammond asked why the government would “give money to at least three groups that were not part of this court case and who reached voluntary agreements with the government before Bill 115 was even introduced.

“They have short-changed everyone else who was actually entitled to a fair settlement. “They should give the money to those whose rights have been violated, not those who were not even a part of the court proceedings. There is no way to explain or justify these secret deals.

“The Wynne Liberals offered an inferior settlement in order to provide Bill 115 payouts to other unions that supported them. Typically, the Wynne Liberals did the wrong thing.”

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