This week’s cascading teachers’ strikes are different.

For the first time in decades, the government of the day hasn’t figured out how to finish what it started.

Intoxicated by their electoral victory, Doug Ford’s Tories placed themselves on a deliberate collision course with teachers last year. By declaring a legislated cap on wages, cuts to teaching jobs, bigger class sizes and mandatory online courses, the premier wasn’t just being proactive but provocative.

Instead of setting the table, the government upended it. Ford assumed he could get his way by simply proclaiming his bottom line, notwithstanding the picket line.

That’s not how labour relations works. Nor how politics plays out.

Now the Progressive Conservatives, plunging in popularity, are desperately trying to whip up public resentment against one-day strikes by teachers. The premier has declared war on union leaders for apparently holding students and parents hostage with a stoppage:

“The unions, head of the unions, are holding the parents hostage, not the teachers,” Ford announced to reporters.

In fact, holding people (or customers and employers) hostage is more or less what strikes are designed to do. It’s a feature, not a bug.

No disruption, no resolution. The obvious alternative would be to declare schools an “essential service,” as Ontario did with the TTC (at the behest of the late Rob Ford, then mayor of Toronto, brother of our current premier Doug).

But the price you pay is that an arbitrator has the final say. As this government well knows, any arbitrator reviewing the current wage dispute would almost certainly find in favour of the teachers, who are being eminently reasonable this time.

Which is why the PCs are in no hurry to hand this one off if they could — but they can’t. In fact, it’s far too early in the process for the government to legislate teachers back to work even if they wanted to.

First, a government must show that the school year is in jeopardy, which is still a long way off after just a few days of missed classes (no matter how disruptive). Second, this government will have to defend itself against a legal challenge of its one per cent pay cap imposed on public-sector workers without any obvious economic emergency to justify it.

What’s interesting about this dispute is that the teachers aren’t asking for a big pay hike. They are asking for roughly two per cent to cover the rate of inflation, rather than accepting the de facto pay cut (falling one per cent behind the cost of living) that the government has ordered them to take. That’s below average private sector wage settlements of 2.1 per cent in Ontario.

As Ford keeps reminding us, teachers earn average salaries of $93,000 a year in Toronto.

“They’re the second-highest-paid teachers in the country — and I’m, I’m fine with that, but stay in the classroom,” Ford argued.

That pay packet may sound generous — until you remember that the cost of living in Ontario’s biggest cities is among the highest in the country. Which is why our plumbers, doctors and others are also among the highest paid nationally.

To force pay restraint — or what amounts to a pay cut — on its employees, the employer must make a persuasive case that it can’t afford to pay more. For example, if revenues have tanked.

The Liberals tried that argument after the 2010 economic crisis and had the facts on their side, but still got overruled by the courts for riding roughshod over collective bargaining rights. Now in 2019, with Ford crowing over a growing economy, with revenues up and unemployment down, on what grounds does he demand that teachers make sacrifices?

“If we didn’t face the deficit and the debt that we’re facing, we wouldn’t be in this position,” the premier protests.

Tell it to a judge.

Excess debt, like abundant beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It can be imaginary, or merely ideology, but it is a flimsy pretext for a pay cap in good economic times.

An arbitrator or judge would likely rule that if taxpayers want those services, they have to pay for them. Not demand that teachers get lower raises than anyone else because a politician in power is taking the path of least resistance.

Perhaps Ford imagined he could play the populist card by casting teachers as overpaid fat cats. But it hasn’t turned out that way, because voters have yet to turn on teachers.

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More strikes might change that equation. More likely the public isn’t playing the blame game because the monetary dispute has been overshadowed by a government overplaying its hand — with unpopular and unjustifiable demands for fewer teaching jobs, bigger class sizes and mandatory online learning.

The Tories have belatedly moderated their clawbacks in these areas, but not eliminated them. Until they do, teachers’ unions will continue to fight back on the non-monetary issues that count most in the court of public opinion, while waging a separate battle over pay restraint in the law courts.

Either way, it’s hard to see how the Ford government will win the day — legally, pedagogically or politically. Never start a war without an exit strategy — or without any strategy at all.

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