. Terrace Review —- Wednesday, November 28, 1990

™ making the national news for reasons that reflect...
¥ badly-on the community. The bets are in on what.
day the picket lines’ go up around School District 88
buildings and how long they'll stay there. ~~

Rather than examining the proposals and motives of the two
sides in this dispute, a more illuminating approach would be to
ask why trustees for a public school board and the teachers
who work for:them are involved in labour negotiations at all.

' The predictably protracted and unproductive bargaining of the
past nine months has given birth to nothing but a litter of
impasses, and more significantly has no relationship to the
delivery of education.

There is no doubt that this district stands out in the province
as a model of everything that can go wrong in staff-manage-
ment relations. Conversations with media representatives from
other jurisdictions reveal a pattern of far quieter and more
respectful bargaining than anything we have come to expect
here. Still, considerable time, energy and expense are brought
to bear on local levels everywhere to place a monetary value
on the job that teachers do. If that appears to be an over-
simplification of the process, it is worth remembering that
contract talks always seem to break down over salary issues.

The lingering acrimony that remains after each episode of
- these exhausting negotiations has taken on a permanent charac-
ter. Although much has been made of the teachers’ association
decision to form a union, that hasn’t in itself substantially
altered the tone of bargaining. Prior to unionization, the
teachers still had to negotiate a contract, the big difference
now is that they can strike, but the bargaining process has been
there for a long time and the process in this district has never
been anything but unpleasant. |

The establishment of labour contracts for teachers should be. _ |

removed from the local level and negotiated in a province-wide
master contract, with the bargaining agents being the B.C.
Teachers’ Federation and the Ministry of Education. If anyone
would argue that a provincial bargaining scheme means loss of
local autonomy, the only local option being lost is the option
to make ourselves miserable. The Ministry of Education has
come up with numerous schemes over the years to make local
adjustments for their operating grants to individual districts,
and the same thing could certainly be done with contract
settlements.

It’s time to relieve trustees of the expectation that they
should be labour negotiation experts as well as stewards of the
public education system. It’s time to relieve teachers of the
.prospect of having to go head-to-head with the representatives
of local taxpayers to fight for their livelihood. It’s time to take
parents and children out of this labour relations circus. It taxes
the imagination to come up with anything worse than what we
have now.

‘nce again, Terrace seems to be on the brink of

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The view from
Victoria —

by John Pifar

And the mud slings on...

VICTORIA — Amid the 505
pages of supplementary mem-
os, letters, transcripts and the
like which accompanied the
Owen Inquiry into the Bill

‘Reid/Bud Smith affair, more

insight into the whole melange
emerges.

_ You may recall that Mr.
Reid had bypassed regular pro-
cedures and regulations to fun-
nel a lottery fund grant to a
company headed by his former
campaign manager George
Doonan and close family friend
Bill Sullivan.

Now, to show you more of
the character (or lack of it) of
the man, here is part of the
transcript of Mr. Reid’s testi- -
mony in October 1989 at the
comptroller-general’s inquiry
into the whole mess. The ques-
tioner is lawyer Ace Hender-
son.

Q: Did you disclose to any
of the other players the connec-
tion, the close connection you
had with Doonan and Sullivan?

A: No.

Q: What about Mr. Sullivan?
Did you disclose the relation-
ship with Mr. Sullivan to the
Mayor?

A: Mr. Sullivan was no more
an associate or friend of mine
than a thousand others in
White Rock. Why should | —
Why should I do that?

Q: Mr. Sullivan has been
having a close personal rela-
tionship with your daughter

since 1983; isn’t that correct?

A: But my daughter hasn’t
lived at home since before that.

Q: And Mr. Sullivan has
been, approximately, weekly or
perhaps bi-weekly over to your
house and social occasions —

A: Yes.

Q: — has he not?

A: Yes.

Q: Well, is he not a close
personal friend in these circum-

stances?
A: Yes.

Q: Did it occur to you that
some of these facts should be
disclosed to others before this
matter was fully agreed upon
and decided?

A: It was my — It would
have been my understanding
that all participants knew each
other, knew who they were,
knew their friendships and rela-
tionships.

Sure Bill.

Political soap opera

A footnote to the latest
flurry of allegations and argu-
ment surrounding the Smith vs
Sihota prizefight, er, political
soap opera.

Starting from the antics of
Reid, ‘‘Mr. Lottery Funds’’,
mixing in Sihota’s private pro-
secution of Reid after the attor-
ney-general’s ministry decided
not to, and then through to the
tapes of Smith’s car-phone calls
etc., it’s a trail of skullduggery,
indiscretions, conflicting state-
ments, character assassination
and obfuscation.

And the trail is getting so
long, soon the general public
won’t be able io know the facts

without a program.

The Social Credit strategy to
continue to attack Sihota is de-
signed to ‘‘work”’ on two
fronts:

1. It will deflect public atten-
tion away from Smith’s “‘inap-
propriate mix”’ of politics and
the administration of justice, as

inquiry commissioner Owen
called it. (To say nothing of
Smith’s extra-marital activities
evidenced on the tapes),

2. Many of the Cabinet
members truly believe that
Sihota lied to the inquiry, that
he pursued prosecution of Reid
only for political gain, and that
he should be prosecuted, may-
be even persecuted.

The NDP strategy is to main-
tain that although it was
recommended that Sihota be
charged for making the Smith
tapes public, he was not.
Therefore, he is “‘innocent’’, :
and Smith remains as ‘‘guilty’’
as (or of) sin.

The upshot of all this is that
the slanging match will simmer
along until the election cam-
paign, where you can bet your
family jewels that the Socreds
will paint the NDP as wiretap-
pers and liars who are led by a
wimp, while the New Demo-
crats will tar and feather the
Socreds with their assorted
scandals, favors for friends,
and Fantasy Gardens untruths
of their leader,

And we wonder why poiliti-
cians are held in such low
esiecem!!

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