A Lesson In Irresponsibility

It's hard to tell these days who governs the country. Either at the provincial or the federal level. Judges who issue orders to disperse illegal gatherings that are impeding the flow of traffic are now ignored by police who choose to remain passive for fear of offending aboriginal groups wanting to make a point by their collective presence at extremely inconvenient points of traffic.

And on the provincial front, though the same type of incident has occurred at that level as well - think, for example, of the situation, still unresolved, that played out at Caledonia, more recently a purposeful provincial law outlawing strike action by civil servants in the teaching profession has been flouted with seeming impunity by Ontario's teachers' unions.

Both elementary and secondary school teachers, hugely offended, not by a freeze in their salary with the hope by the provincial government that this economic management will benefit the burgeoning deficit, nor with a diminishment of their sumptuous benefits, but by, they claim, the infringement on their bargaining right in settling contracts, through government interference.

As a result, they will once again, defiantly, walk off the job in protest. Walking off the job is striking and Bill 115 was enacted to make it an illegal activity.

Ontario has settled its contracts amicably and reasonably with other public service sector employees.  But not the teachers whose militancy and righteousness in the face of their plush perquisites, retirement endowment and munificent salaries being threatened makes their stance somewhat difficult to take.

Both government and unions/teachers have said repeatedly it is not their intention to make victims of students. Government, at the very least, is reliably earnest when it makes that declaration, teachers far less so, with their indignation compelling them to withdraw extracurricular involvement. And imposing yet another day sans school on students.

Union/teacher action in striking - which they deny represents a strike, since it is illegal under Bill 115, but rather, say union leaders piously, a "political protest", which nomenclature seeks to escape mature responsibility for immature conduct - inconveniences families at best, while teaching children by example that egregious displays of disobedience are not necessarily only a child's prerogative.

And at the same time defies the authority that employs them through taxpayer-funded resources.

Contending that their "political protest" is protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and is not to be considered strike action, the unions are childishly obdurate in the certainty of their righteous frustration with being compelled to accept a contract that leaves their expectations at higher remuneration stranded for the life of the contract.