SRINGWATER NEWS
MPP DUNLOP HAPPY TO SEE YORK UNIVERSITY STUDENTS BACK TO CLASS

While we are all glad to finally see York University’s students return to class, we must remember that those 50,000 students were kept from their studies for 10 weeks before Dalton McGuinty finally took any action. Whenever there is a labour dispute in a sector that receives public funding, the government’s priority must be to protect the innocent third parties affected by that dispute. Hopefully, Dalton McGuinty has learned that lesson.

Mr. McGuinty repeatedly used respect for collective bargaining as an excuse for waiting so long before ending the strike. Collective bargaining rights do not exist in a vacuum, nor are they arbitrary. There are real people who were harmed by this strike and they deserve compensation from the McGuinty government for the ordeal they’ve been through. 

What the so-called “Education Premier” failed to understand is that unlike contracting for services in the private sector, university students cannot simply transfer to another university to complete the courses suspended because of a strike.  They are literally held hostage. In fact, it took a massive on-line protest of over 50,000 students and their parents on the Facebook page, “York Not Hostage” before Dalton McGuinty finally surfaced to bring an end to the strike.

It took a similar massive on-line protest against the government’s proposed restrictions on teenage drivers before Premier McGuinty took notice and backed down. See a pattern here?

The unions representing Ontario’s public elementary teachers have set a strike deadline for the end of March. The Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation set a deadline this week in its negotiations with the Toronto District School Board. There are eight Ontario universities that could be facing strikes by their teaching assistants and contract faculty before the end of 2010.

Is it going to take massive on-line protests in these cases to get Dalton McGuinty to stop using our young people, like the York University students, as pawns?

With a number of potential labour disruptions on the horizon in education, the McGuinty government must have a plan in place now that will minimize the impact of a strike on students, including requiring universities to develop their own student-focused strike management plans. 

The week of January 22 we reconvened in the Ontario Legislature and debated and passed back to work legislation to the end the strike.