B.C. Teachers' Federation can't translate court victory into progress at the bargaining table

Straight.com
Charlie Smith
February 2, 2012

On this day, most of the teachers chatting outside a conference room are wearing black. Black T-shirts, black shoes, black pants, or black skirts, and, in the case of B.C. Teachers’ Federation president Susan Lambert, a black scarf. That’s because these BCTF representatives are gathered at the Delta Vancouver Airport Hotel on January 27, the eve of what they call a “dark day in education”: the 10th anniversary of the Gordon Campbell government’s passage of bills 27 and 28, which cancelled provisions in their collective agreement without any consultation whatsoever.

Until January 28, 2002, the BCTF could negotiate restrictions on class size, as well as limits on the number of kids with special needs that each teacher would accept. In addition, the BCTF previously had a say on the length of the school calendar and on its members’ hours and days of work.

“All of us who have any kind of history in the B.C. Teachers’ Federation are acutely aware of that date,” Lambert tells the Georgia Straight in an interview near the hotel lobby. “Because on that date, Christy Clark, as minister of education, heralded this wonderful piece of legislation to give ‘flexibility and choice’ to parents and students. They brought in legislation to strip every shred of collective-agreement language associated with class size and composition—and to prohibit our rights to bargain class size and composition in the future.”


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