B.C. Views Tug of war for transportation taxes. p6
Staying safe on the World Wide Web. p3
THE NEWS
Arts&life Simple guide for good life at THSS. p19
www.mapleridgenews.com Wednesday, January 29, 2014 · Serving Maple Ridge & Pitt Meadows · est. 1978 · 604-467-1122 · Delivery: 604-466-6397
Union says B.C. Hydro limiting OT Members claim that longer outages and higher expenses are a result by Ph i l M e lnych uk staff reporter
Colleen Flanagan/THE NEWS
Glorious gown Leonie Huget, 17, an international student from Solingen, Germany who will be graduating from Garibaldi secondary, shops for a graduation dress at Twice in a Lifetime – a consignment sale at the Greg Moore Youth Centre on Sunday. The event aims to raise money for youth in the community who would otherwise not be able to afford high school graduation ceremonies. Ten dresses were sold.
People are freezing in the dark longer because of B.C. Hydro’s cap on overtime, says the lineman’s union. Meanwhile, the public utility is paying contractors $10 an hour more to fix the broken wires and transformers any time a storm hits and knocks out powerlines. “I don’t see why people should be punished for answering phones and to come and put the lights back on. That’s what we do, most of the time in the worst weather,” said Doug McKay, business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 258. “My guys are very choked about what’s going on.”
See Hydro, p15
Teachers validated in court by Nei l Corbe tt staff reporter
The B.C. Supreme Court has ruled that the provincial government violated teachers’ rights in disregarding negotiated class size limits and that the former did not bargain in good faith. It also ordered the province to pay the B.C. Teachers Federation
$2 million. The ruling comes after a 12-year court battle between teachers and Victoria. “We’re ecstatic,” Maple Ridge Teachers Association president George Serra said after the ruling Monday. “You fight this hard to prove wrongdoing, and when you do it, it feels pretty good.” He was pleased by how direct Justice Susan Griffin was about the Liberal government. “The court concluded that the government did not negotiate in good faith with the union after
the Bill 28 decision,” Griffin wrote in her reasons for judgement. “One of the problems was that the government representatives were preoccupied with another strategy. Their strategy was to put such pressure on the union that it would provoke a strike by the union. The government representatives thought this would give government the opportunity to gain political support for imposing legislation on the union.” Griffin ruled the B.C. government’s replacement legislation, passed in 2011, is as unconstitu-
tional as the 2002 law called Bill 28 that removed class size and special needs support from the BCTF contract. BCTF president Jim Iker said the ruling returns contract language that was in place in 2002. He expects that the province’s 60 school districts will have to rehire teachers and special need assistants to reduce class size. He said there were 1,200 education specialists THE NEWS/files affected by the 2002 legislation, including teacher-librarians and George Serra untangles hearts during a demonstration for support teachers counsellors. See Teachers, p3 outside the school district office in 2012.
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