With high school teachers on strike in Durham, Peel, and Sudbury, and elementary teachers across the province set to begin job action Monday, the public could be forgiven for wondering why there is again turmoil in Ontario schools. After all, it was just a few short years ago that our schools were plagued by walkouts, cancelled extracurricular activities and protests by teachers. But while there is always some degree of tension between parties on opposite ends of the bargaining table, the Liberal government has largely itself to blame for the current impasse.

All of this hearkens back to the 2012 Drummond Report that the Liberals commissioned to help find ways to responsibly reduce government spending. With regards to education, the primary recommendation of the report was for the government to scale back the rollout of full-day kindergarten. The report specifically recommended against imposing a wage freeze because they “damage labour relations and are often followed by wage catch-ups.”

So after paying for and receiving this expert advice, what did the government decide to do? It essentially ignored all of it, went ahead with the full-scale rollout of full-day kindergarten, and imposed a wage freeze on teachers. And it is important to note that this “freeze” was actually a pay decrease for teachers as they were forced to take several unpaid days off. So it should not be surprising to anyone that after years of wage cuts, teachers are now trying to make up lost ground.

The other thing the Liberals did was introduce these and other changes without consulting Ontario’s school boards. The prime example of this was the introduction of Regulation 274, which changed hiring practices in schools to increase the emphasis given to seniority. Purportedly to address systemic nepotism in teacher hiring (although this was never actually demonstrated to exist), it has reduced the ability of school principals to hire teachers that best meet the needs of their schools. So it is only natural that school boards now want to get rid of this provision in the current round of bargaining.

Taken together, what the government essentially did was to take the two parties that represent opposite ends of the bargaining table, and impose conditions that made things worse for both sides, all because it was politically advantageous for the Liberal party at the time. Had they not done this, both school boards and teacher unions would currently be much closer to an agreement.

But wasn’t Kathleen Wynne — former school trustee and education minister — supposed to solve all of these problems? During the Liberal leadership campaign, Wynne refused to admit that the government’s decision to impose contracts on teachers was a mistake, because criticizing her own party would have jeopardized her chances of winning. Instead, when asked about how she would repair relations with teachers, she spoke ad nauseam about how introducing a new collective bargaining process would fix everything.

So how is that new process working out? It has been an utter failure. Under this system, even if a local school board and union work collaboratively and do reach an agreement, it does not matter unless a central agreement has already been achieved. This process is much more cumbersome than the one it replaced and has produced absolutely no results.

There are some who would like to pin the blame for the current labour dispute solely on teachers and their unions. For example, in a recent interview on CBC’s Metro Morning, former conservative education minister Janet Ecker stated that the main problem is that teachers “don’t have a lot of experience in other sectors to give them a perspective.”

Well, how about this for some perspective: Over the past decade Ontario’s graduation rate has increased from 68 to 84 per cent and our province is now consistently rated as having one of the top education systems in the world. And all of this was accomplished through the hard work and effort of our teachers. The Liberals could have continued to work with teachers to build on that success, but instead chose a more politically motivated path. And now we are all stuck with the consequences of those bad decisions.

Sachin Maharaj is a PhD student in educational policy at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto and a teacher in the Toronto District School Board.

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