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Editorial: Provoking strike was shameful

The sa国际传媒 government threw your children under the school bus. A sa国际传媒 Supreme Court justice says the sa国际传媒 Liberals, under Premier Christy Clark, deliberately tried to provoke the province鈥檚 teachers into going on strike.

The sa国际传媒 government threw your children under the school bus. A sa国际传媒 Supreme Court justice says the sa国际传媒 Liberals, under Premier Christy Clark, deliberately tried to provoke the province鈥檚 teachers into going on strike. It was a campaign so cynical it makes the 鈥渜uick-win鈥 ethnic-vote ploy seem like a footnote.

The judgment by Justice Susan Griffin was released Monday, and Clark said the next day that the government would likely appeal.

Griffin wrote that the government had interfered with teachers鈥 bargaining rights when it took provisions out of their collective agreements with Bill 28 in 2002. Those provisions mainly related to bargaining class size and composition.

The justice knows this topic well. In 2011, she ruled Bill 28 unconstitutional and gave the government a year to come up with a new one.

The government turned around and passed a law that Griffin wrote was 鈥渧irtually identical.鈥

The government had talked to the teachers鈥 federation and then argued that those talks made the revised law constitutional. The notion that chatting to someone about voiding their constitutional rights makes it OK to erase those rights sounds like playground arguments.

The proposition certainly didn鈥檛 cut any ice with Griffin, who ruled that the 2012 bill was also unconstitutional. She ordered bargaining rights restored and told the government to pay the sa国际传媒 Teachers鈥 Federation $2 million.

The finding that the government essentially photocopied an unconstitutional law and handed it in again is bad enough, but British Columbians should be even more outraged by Griffin鈥檚 assessment of the government鈥檚 behaviour during contract negotiations two years ago.

鈥淭heir 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,鈥 Griffin wrote.

Citing internal notes from government negotiator Paul Straszak, the judge said the government wanted to force striking teachers back to work and take care of the Bill 28 problems with one piece of legislation. They expected the teachers would strike because the government鈥檚 refusal to negotiate working conditions would be unacceptable.

Instead of striking, the teachers staged a series of low-grade job actions, such as refusing to prepare report cards. The judge said the government tried harder to foment a strike, including by cutting funding to school districts to try to force them to cancel teachers鈥 leaves and professional-development days.

With the government committed to sparking a strike, the negotiating table was unbalanced. Fair collective bargaining means that each side has something to lose by not reaching an agreement. In this case, the government had nothing to lose because it wanted a strike.

The scheme was purely political 鈥 to win the government political support, and to justify legislating teachers back to work.

If the judge鈥檚 assessment is correct, the government was willing to hurl all of sa国际传媒鈥檚 students and their parents into the upheaval of a strike with all its expense for parents and disruption for students.

The ethnic-vote incident showed that Clark fostered a win-at-all-costs attitude that gave her minions licence to ignore their consciences and the rules. A similar attitude is evident in the teachers debacle.

Liberal staff members lost their jobs over the ethnic-vote scandal because they crossed the line between government and party work. The plot against students and parents (for they, as much as teachers, were the victims) wasn鈥檛 illegal, but it was morally reprehensible.

It appears Clark owes British Columbians an apology.