Like most people, I have had a few regrets in life. One of those is the lost opportunity to simply refuse to repay the provincial government for the paltry $40 per child per day that it handed out willy-nilly during the 2014 strike/lockout, and for which it is now demanding repayment from some parents.
With no kids left in the public-school system, I regret the loss of the opportunity to find out what government will actually do, how far it will journey down a politically perilous path to reclaim those hastily offered and ideologically motivated cheques.
Parents were clearly told that they could use the money to explore other educational opportunities. Not surprisingly, many parents jumped at the opportunity, and student enrolment at private-sector schools rose 6.75 per cent, according to the Federation of Independent School Associations of B.C.
That, depending on how you calculate it, is a shift of thousands of kids from public to independent schools. Altogether, the combined enrolment at independent schools rose to about 76,000 students, while nearly 500,000 public school students stayed home or did whatever they did.
Parents were not required to account for how the money was used, but the cost to government is estimated at up to $12 million a day. Now the government, like one of those quickie payday-loan outfits, wants the money back and wants it now, telling parents they should have read the fine print.
The money, apparently, was to go only to parents with kids under 13 enrolled in the public system in September 2014, notwithstanding the fact that there was no public system for the first half of that September and the minister of education was on record as saying he could see no end to the situation anyway.
Parents who read only the headlines and hurriedly filled out the applications to independent schools took the government at its word. The $40 would take the sting out of independent schools’ fees. In light of the non-efforts by the government and the B.C. Teachers’ Federation to get public schools open, parents wanted to see their kids in classrooms somewhere.
So they enrolled their kids in a variety of independent schools, all of which were filling up fast.
The government knew full well this was happening and possibly felt it would put additional pressure on the BCTF.
So what now? Incredibly, some parents have received letters from a collection agency demanding repayment of the $40 per kid per day, the kind of outfit that chases down deadbeat credit-abusers.
The situation has all the earmarks of a potentially embarrassing parent revolt, leaving the government with the distasteful options of either backing off or seeking redress against families to the limit of the law.
The government might have a problem, though, because the $40 per day “loan” was originally presented, or at least understood, as a grant, not a loan, and with few, if any, strings attached. Many people would never have accepted the “loan” had they had known the long-term ramifications.
Even if it was a loan in the government’s mind, the $40 per day was, at best, an unsecured loan. While there is ample law in B.C. and Canada governing “payday” or other unsecured loans, the options available to a creditor (seizure of goods, garnishee of wages, debtor summons) are remedies that might be unpalatable to the government, even a government apparently not ashamed to demand the money back.
Not only was the $40 never clearly presented as a loan, there was not even a requirement for applicant credit checks to determine the risk to the creditor, in this case, the government.
Again, most unsecured loans are granted on the basis of the debtor’s promise to repay the loan within certain time limits. That apparently was not part of the $40-per-day deal, at least not as parents understood it. So someone far up the bureaucratic ladder has dropped another fine mess into the government’s lap.
Parents might have been better off borrowing money from the Mob. At least, the terms of the loan and the consequences of non-repayment would have been clear at the outset.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
