Dear Editor,
As a retired teacher, I have been pleased to see more letters supporting the aims of teachers. Hopefully, the provincial government will finally settle the current negotiations.
However, this still leaves a very large elephant in the room!
I believe that the province will go on to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada when their B.C. court appeal is denied. As long as they drag out the legal process, they are not paying out what the courts say they must.
So what happens if the Supreme Court rules against them? Do they have the mendacity to invoke the not-withstanding clause?
It was recently suggested that an overall income tax of three per cent would put things educationally back to the 2002 classroom standards.
I would much prefer that the 2002 tax cuts which got us into this mess were rolled back. We might even consider a surcharge on those who benefitted from the cut.
Every child who has been a student in the B.C. School System since 2002 has been significantly shortchanged in their education each year since then. It would be easy to monetarily quantify this by grade. It screams for a class action law suit.
Ironically, the suit could use provincial education records to establish each student’s years in the system and thus the amount owed to them, plus interest.
It can be argued that the provincial government acted maliciously and capriciously when it tore up the teachers’ contract. Teachers gave up a salary increase to obtain better classroom conditions.
Do you think a judge would be so inclined as to award punitive damages in a class action suit?
John Howard, Aldergrove