Province likely made first big move to reach tentative deal in teachers dispute: analyst

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – After months at a stalemate, the BC Teachers’ Federation and the provincial government have come to a tentative deal in the education labour dispute.

BC teachers will vote on the deal on Thursday.

So far, no details of the agreement have been released and there’s no word yet on when kids will be back in class. But parents have been waking up to hope that classes will soon resume, following the announcement of the tentative deal early this morning.

OMNI TV political analyst Kim Emerson says it took far too long for the two sides to reach an agreement.

“The system is broken. The system doesn’t work. It’s quite clear it didn’t work for teachers, didn’t work for the government, didn’t work for the people of BC and didn’t work for the students of BC. Something has to change as we go forward.”

Emerson speculates the province made the first big move to lead to a tentative agreement.

“What I would consider some of the things that contributed.. are the government’s attitude on E-80 changed after they realized that other unions had stepped up and offered money to the teachers — large dollars to the teachers.”

“The other issue I think that really helped the government realize they needed to do something to get this going is pressure being put on them by foreign governments,” he adds.

“The premier is about to embark on a trade mission to India, where she’s taking Amrik Virk, the advanced education minister, with her. He’s going over there with her to help promote sending students — secondary and post-secondary — to British Columbia for teaching. Pressure comes from there, pressure comes from China, pressure comes from other foreign diplomat who are saying ‘We don’t like what we’re seeing here. We’re not going to send our students.'”

He says that would be a big problem for the province. “The government gets about three times as much money for each foreign student as they do for a kid from BC. And they’ve been relying on that money pretty heavily as of late, and they’ve been promoting it big-time every time they go overseas. And the numbers have been increasing quite dramatically at colleges and universities and now, also at some high schools.”

Emerson believes the teachers responded with movement on its part. “I think the teachers realized once the government moved or did something on E-80 then that was the catalyst to help them get going in some other areas.”

He gives credit to mediator Vince Ready. “He’s the catalyst that got this going. He’s the one that stepped in and said ‘Look, there is some room. There is some way to find common ground here, to bridge this gap and get this thing sorted.'”

“The best hope now is by early next week, kids will be back in the classroom and things will be back to normal,” he adds, noting “normal” is a relative term.

We still have issues before the Supreme Court and there has been an antagonistic relationship between the teachers union and the government for years. Emerson doesn’t think today’s news means any of the underlying problems have been fixed.

“Nothing’s really fixed at all… But I think once this settlement is done and people are back in the classroom, we get on to the court case. The court case will settle itself out likely by early 2015 — sometime around March, I would think they should have some kind of final resolution on that — and from that point, maybe the two sides can get back together and try to figure out a better way to make this thing work. Because everybody can see that it doesn’t work right now.”