Education minister defends multimillion-dollar union payments Erin McCracken
erin.mccracken@metroland.com
Ontario’s education minister is justifying her controversial decision to pay three education unions $2.5 million without first asking for expense receipts. Those funds, she said, were meant to offset the costs of a lengthy contract negotiation process under a new system that took the better part of a year to iron out. The Ontario Secondary Schools Teachers’ Federation and the English Catholic Teachers’ Association each received $1 million, while $500,000 was given to the French language teacher’s
federation, known as the AEFO, to cover hotel and meeting room expenses at their request. This year marks the first time the nine education unions have negotiated a collective agreement under Bill 122, the 2014 School Boards Collective Bargaining Act. “We’ve been at it for a year,” Liz Sandals told reporters during a stop in Ottawa on Oct. 23. It’s a process that will “never ever reoccur,” she said, adding the first six months focused on establishing the two-tier system, with bargaining tables at both the local and central level. “There’s never been a cen-
tral agreement before,” she said, adding every clause in each of the nine inaugural agreements has had to be negotiated. “But what we recognize is that both the trustee associations and the unions have had extraordinary expenses with implementing this first round of bargaining,” Sandals said. “These are expenses that won’t happen again in the future.” Sandals disagreed that the payments were kept secret, instead saying the details in the collective agreements simply hadn’t been publicly disclosed. “Because what I’ve said over and over again is that
I’m not bargaining in the media,” she said. “So it wasn’t that there was any great secrecy about it. It was just that we hadn’t released any of the details of the agreements.” It doesn’t make sense from the viewpoint of management, or the province, to release the details of one contract before the others have been finalized, Sandals said. The minister said the new legislation was required in the wake of the amalgamation of the school boards across the province, beginning in the mid-1990s, which resulted in the removal of their taxation rights. In her then role as presi-
dent of the Ontario Public School Boards’ Associations, Sandals told the government of the day that if it was going to take away those taxation rights, it needed to repair the “unworkable” bargaining system. The boards were still the employer, but the government had become the funding source. When the Liberals came into power, the government created voluntary provincial discussion tables, during which “assistance” was provided to the trustee associations and the unions “to support them with the expenses of carrying on those provincial discussion tables,” San-
dals said. Those costs can’t compare to what the previous provincial government doled out after it restructured the education system. As the amalgamation system was rolled out, Sandals said the Conservative government of the time set up a three-year fully staffed and funded commission that travelled the province several times to oversee the overhaul. “Trust me that cost tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions,” she said. “This is peanuts compared to what the Tories paid to implement their part of it.” - With files from Torstar
All pumpkins, both creepy and kooky, go in the green bin after Halloween
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Space provided through a partnership between industry and Ontario municipalities to support waste diversion programs. R0013526201-1029
18 Kanata Kourier-Standard - Thursday, October 29, 2015