Editor: Re: “Teachers have lost the moral high ground,” (Letters, The Times, March 15).
If true, teachers are definitely not the only ones to “have lost the moral high ground.” The provincial government, their employer and strike opponent, is at least at par, morally speaking.
I could understand and sympathize with the dilemma faced by B.C.’s government over its public sector workers’ contracts’ non-negotiable “net zero” and “me-too” aspects and clauses. Give just one union but a single percentage point wage and benefit increase, and all the other unions who’ve already signed “net zero” contracts have the contractual right to say “our workers want an increase, too.”
Furthermore, the government claims that what the BCTF members are asking would increase the provincial budget deficit by $2 billion.
However, where the government loses my sympathy is in regards to the considerable corporate tax cuts that its MLAs were tripping over themselves to implement, once the Liberals were elected in 2001. And then there are also the huge subsidies given to (some already profitable) big businesses. Where was the unrelenting “net zero” then?
But they create jobs, we are told. According to statistics (where available), there have been few, if any, notable number of jobs created (although, yes, likely the number of very low paying, foreign McJobs have increased).
No, considering the tens, perhaps hundreds, of billions of taxpayer dollars our provincial government has flagrantly granted to gratuitously wealthy businesses and corporations over the past decade, it has no moral ground on which to stand regarding this major fiscal issue.
Frank G. Sterle, Jr.,
White Rock