British Columbia

Interference cited
as govt sets limit
on teachers wages

B.C.’s Social Credit government will pay
for a 2.8 per cent increase in salaries for the
province’s teachers, even though inflation is
running around at least four per cent.

If teachers in the province’s 75 school
districts want a wage that keeps up with
inflation, the cost will have to be borne by
residential taxpayers, Education Minister
Tony Brummet said on the weekend.

The minister’s announcement amounts
to interference in the collective bargaining
process, B.C. Teachers Federation (BCTF)
president Elsie McMurphy said Monday.

Brummet told a Saturday meeting of the
B.C. School Trustees Association (BCSTA),
and a press conference after, that the
government was hiking its grants to the
school districts by eight per cent. But educa-
tion community representatives say the
money is at best a catch-up for five years of
government under-funding of public educa-
tion.

“We have to remember that included in
that (eight per cent hike) is over five per cent
just to reach where we should be today and
where we should have been,” BCSTA pres-
ident Charles Hingston commented.

“T personally think there should be more
money for education. The people of this
province have made it very clear they think
education is a priority.”

In dollar figures, the education ministry
has added $106 million to the grants it
makes to the school boards every year, and
which for this fiscal year — July 1987
through June, 1988 — are about $900 mil-
lion, Brummet said.

Additionally, the ministry has allotted
$72.4 million for “instructional costs,”
Brummet told the trustees. This is divided
into two parts, he said.

The first part funds school districts for
the salaries they have paid for the current
fiscal year, as negotiated last spring with
their local teacher associations. The rest of
the $72.4 million — it is unclear how the
money is divided — will go towards wage
increases to be negotiated for the 1988-89
fiscal year, the minister reported.

This represents a departure from the
practice whereby the ministry funds the

salary increase one year after it has been
negotiated — if effect, paying boards after
they have paid their teachers — and
instead sets a provision for wage increases
before the next fiscal year starts, and before
wages and benefits are negotiated.

For 1988-89, the provision for salary
increase is 2.8 per cent in excess of the cur-
rent fiscal year. Brummet said the figure was
based on Ministry of Labour data concern-
ing average negotiated settlements in the
private and public sector in 1987, and “pro-
jected settlements” in those sectors in 1988-
89.

In effect, the ministry is telling local
school boards what to offer their teachers,
critics say.

The only recourse boards have to go
beyond that limit is to raise taxes on residen-
tial properties, they note.

Indeed, Brummet told the trustees in his
speech: “‘If you, as boards, negotiate settle-
ments in excess of what is provided for in
the established provincial instructional cost,
this year or in future years, that will create
problems for you and may force you to ask
your local taxpayers to bear the cost.”

That such an option has grown increas-
ing untenable was asserted in a warning
from school superintendents two weeks
ago. Their association president, Van-
couver school board superintendent Dante
Lupini, and other leaders warned of a pos-
sible “taxpayer revolt” if residential prop-
erty owners were faced with another large
tax hike, as they did in 1987.

The superintendents blamed declining
government funding in the past five years,
and the province’s seizure from boards of
the power to tax industrial and commercial
properties in their districts, as key reasons
for large residential tax hikes.

Apparently stung by the superintendents’
remarks, Brummet termed them “irrespon-
sible” and “misleading” in his Saturday
speech to the trustees.

But as Hingston of the BCSTA pointed
out, most of the eight per cent increase has
merely provided for some services that went
missing since the restraint years were intro-
duced back in 1982.

a
McMURPHY

‘An assistant to Brummet acknowledged
that the hike does not mean an eight per
cent hike to local districts’ budgets. Under
the education ministry’s “fiscal frame-
work,” the province’s funding accounts for
an average 75 per cent of a district’s budget,
with the remaining 25 per cent raised
locally much of it through residential
taxes.

McMurphy said the BCTF considers
Brummet’s 2.8 per cent provision for salar-
ies as “nothing more than an opening salvo
in the bargaining process.”

“Teachers can make a legitimate case for
an 11 per cent hike. In the past five years,
we’ve fallen between 12 and 15 per cent
behind the cost of living,” she pointed out.

“IT could make $10,000 more a year if I
moved to Ontario,” McMurphy said.

Many teachers have in fact left the pro-
vince to find work elsewhere, and the result-
ing teacher shortage “is almost upon us,”
she warned. =

McMurphy said also that the increase
does not account for items such as yearly

‘increments for experience and benefits.

McMurphy said that many have viewed
Brummet’s announcement as an attempt to
interfere with the collective bargaining pro-
cess.

“The government has a responsibility to
share the cost (of wage settlements)... They
set the rules but they don’t accept the
responsibility,” she said.

Regarding the warning about a crisis in
education financing made recently by the
Association of British Columbia School
Superintendents, the BCTF president said:
“They'd reached a point where they
thought not speaking out would be profes-
sionally irresponsible.”

? HINGSTON

LUPINI

BRUMMET

Local residents are up in arms over the
proposed expansion of Trans Mountain
Pipeline Co.’s tank farm on Burnaby
Mountain — a move few residents knew
anything about until a few weeks ago.

The residents charge that the National
Energy Board ignored its own regulations
in failing to adequately advertise hearings
into the expansion in local newspapers
and are demanding the’ hearings — to
conclude in less than a week — reopen in
Burnaby.

Trans Mountain and the NEB “had
virtually ignored the neighbourhood until
we came on the scene,” said the residents’
spokesman, David Fairey.

Fairey said the residents, who packed a
hall last week demanding the expansion be
stopped, say the presence of a petroleum
products tank farm on the mountain’s
slopes is incompatible with the rapidly
increasing residential component in the
area.

Most residents knew nothing about

Trans Mountain’s application to add three
holding tanks to its 10-tank farm until
hearings were already in their second week
in Vancouver. By that time the deadline
for applications had passed six weeks ear-
lier, Fairey said.

The Burnaby Health Dept. told the
NEB that they’ve received close to 500
complaints from North Burnaby residents
about the stink and resulting illness from
the bulk crude oil stored at the facility.
Eight products are piped to the site from

Burnaby residents oppose tank farm expansion

Trans Mountain Pipeline’s Burnaby tank farm.

ening hearings, to Ottawa. “We can’t hear
the company’s arguments, or be able to
reply to them,” he noted.

The residents are asking for a new hear-
ing, for the company to make a new appli-
cation, and for the hearings to be held in
Burnaby — or that the NEB deny the
application for expansion, Fairey said.

In the brief to the NEB Fairey criticizes
the board for failing to advertise the hear-
ings in a Burnaby newspaper, instead plac-
ing ads in The Vancouver Sun, The

Edmonton, and are further piped across
Burnaby Mountain to the Westridge
transshipment dock, which the company
is also seeking to expand, on Burrard Inlet.

Fairey has been given until Feb. 26 to
send his brief, outlining reasons for reop-
Province and Le Soleil de Colombie, only
six days prior to deadline for submission
of briefs.

He noted the NEB rejected an earlier
request from Trans Mountain to accept
written submissions only, without hear-
ings, but criticized the board for ignoring
environmental hazards — the chance of
which is increased, the residents say, with
the enhanced tanker traffic the expansion
plans entail — in giving its reasons for
rejecting the request.

The brief charges that the board should
have considered the fire hazard the pro-
posed new tanks present, the recent reduc-
tion of firefighting services in Burnaby, the
danger earthquakes pose to the facility
and several other factors.

2 « Pacific Tribune, February 24, 1988