Day by day, there’s a growing sense of the enormity of the government’s loss in the B.C. Supreme Court decision over the teachers’ contract.
Liberals were tight-lipped the day it came down on Jan. 27, preferring to focus on the present and future in the education world.
Premier Christy Clark opened up a bit later, declaring her fundamental disagreement with the court’s decision.
Then her government filed notice to appeal and tried to hide behind that when the legislature resumed sitting this week. Attorney General Suzanne Anton refused a dozen times to answer questions because the tangled mess is before the court — again.
The next day, Education Minister Peter Fassbender dropped that gambit and tried to justify the government’s position. Then the premier opened up again, saying what actually happened during the 2011-12 school year is far different from the judge’s interpretations.
The decision stated that the government tried to goad the B.C. Teachers’ Federation into a full-scale strike, to further the government’s political interest in winning public support for legislation ending any job action.
Clark pointed out that the full strike never happened. Whatever the motivations or gambits involved in that year-long set of talks, it never came to a strike. A mediator was appointed and a settlement reached.
But the judge was fully aware of that. It didn’t seem to impress her, because she fined the government $2 million for bad-faith bargaining.
There were more revealing developments Friday. The government applied for a stay, pending the appeal. And it tried to claw back some control over cabinet documents that would shed more light on the case.
The application for a stay includes numerous affidavits from school officials explaining what they have to do to comply with the judgment, which orders B.C.’s education system to back up 12 years and operate under all the class-size restrictions, special-needs provisions and specialized-teacher requirements of the day.
The overall effect is portrayed as the fiscal equivalent of an earthquake, a tsunami and an asteroid strike all hitting the school system at once.
“Extraordinary disruption ... vast and abrupt diversion of resources ... irreparable harm to the public interest of an unprecedented magnitude.”
Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of teachers and classrooms have to be found, hired or built immediately, if the system abides by the decision as it stands.
Asking for a stay amounts to the government saying it simply can’t afford to obey the law. So its only option is to ask for a waiver while it tries to get the law changed, by getting the Supreme Court ruling overturned by the Court of Appeal.
The government could still pull out of this loss. But it’s starting from a long way back. It’s even further back on the second part of the stay that’s requested. One of the sidebar issues in the case was whether the cabinet documents relevant to the negotiating strategy should be publicly released.
Justice Susan Griffin ruled they could be, in a certain fashion. She allowed the BCTF to release its 250-page final argument — which cites some of the documents — to its 44,000 members at some point.
Now the government wants that plan quashed. The argument is that if it wins the appeal, the release of the cabinet documents would be cancelled. But if they are released beforehand, the victory would be moot.
So just when public interest intensifies in what exactly the Liberal cabinet was considering that would lead a judge to land on them so heavily, the government wants to lock it all up under the doctrine of cabinet confidentiality.
The last aspect of Friday’s application is a forlorn gesture concerning the $2 million it was ordered to hand over to the union.
The government isn’t asking to stay that award. It doesn’t have to, because it would recoup the funds if it wins the appeal.
In the meantime, “the BCTF thus takes the interim benefit of a substantial damage award.”
In other words, the union can earn interest on the fine, while the government desperately tries to find a way around that obligation, and all the others.
