Back in the good old days, when they all happily hated the government together, the NDP and the B.C. Teachers’ Federation were a lot more simpatico.
Back in the good old days, if the party and the union held concurrent meetings right next to each other, you’d need crossing guards to handle the brothers and sisters migrating back and forth to vote for each other’s denunciations of the government.
Times have changed. They tried dual conventions Saturday in Victoria but it was like two opposing teams taking timeouts in separate locker rooms.
The BCTF held their representative assembly in The Empress Hotel’s Crystal Ballroom, a short walk from the adjoining convention centre that was full of 800 NDP members.
It wasn’t to be neighbourly, or to show solidarity. It was to get in their faces about the lack of progress on contract talks. New Democrats wore orange, with party logos. Teachers wore red T-shirts with #redforBCEd and made themselves known over the course of the day at the convention.
The days of not being able to tell them apart are gone. The NDP is government and in the decades that the BCTF has been representing teachers it has yet to find a government with which it can get along.
As someone who has gone several rounds in the battle over the years noted, speaking of education bargaining generally: “Nobody does it as badly as we do.”
The current mediator found that summation so apt he included the anonymous quote in his most recent gloomy report a few weeks ago.
There weren’t any obvious dramatic showdowns on Saturday. But after nine months of negotiating with their former comrades in arms and getting almost nowhere, remarks are getting more pointed.
Premier John Horgan fondly recalled the olden days in his speech to the party.
“For years and years teachers fought the B.C. Liberals in court, to get back a collective agreement that was signed with New Democrats in the 1990s.”
He said it was the NDP then that allowed teachers to negotiate class size and composition, which are among the sticking points today.
After the Liberal government eliminated that, he said “for 16 years the federation fought to get those rights restored and by God we were right beside them.”
There are challenges now at the bargaining table, he said. “But here’s the difference: We believe in free collective bargaining.”
He told the party that the negotiating has to be done at the bargaining table, “not at the convention, not in question period, not on the evening news.”
Despite the fact the powerful union of 46,000 members is in an adversarial position with his government, Horgan seems to believe they’re all still on the same side, and it’s just a tiff about a contract.
He said many BCTF members still support many of his government’s initiatives.
“It’s not a dispute about values.”
That wasn’t the impression emanating from the BCTF room next door.
A stirring quote about education and teachers rights was read out to about 350 members there. It turned out to be from Horgan five years ago. And the point was that it doesn’t mesh with what the government is doing today.
BCTF president Teri Mooring told members the session was explicitly staged to make sure the NDP remembers their promises.
Horgan recalled being right beside them in the long successful court fight over bargaining rights, but Mooring said the government position now would undo everything they won.
It “flies in the face of everything they said for 15 years in opposition.”
She said the two sides still have more in common than not. But the government’s stand “broke a lot of trust.”
“Angry, determined and resolute,” was her description of where they stand now.
Apart from working conditions, the union wants all vacancies filled and a big pay raise.
Even after the epic court victory that restored the old contract, led to the hiring of 3,000 more teachers and a massive hike in the education budget, the BCTF is a world leader when it comes to nursing grievances. It still thinks the system is underfunded and sharing values with the NDP isn’t going to smooth that over.
