If you say something loud enough and often enough, people will believe it right?
That seems to be the hope of the union leadership currently doing battle with the Ford government in Ontario — denounce cuts to education and low wages and get the public on your side.
You can’t listen to a union leader speak, or their official representatives in the NDP, without hearing how Doug Ford has cut education. They’ve also done a good job making people believe that due to Ford, everyone is making $39,000 a year, an unlivable wage and therefore CUPE, currently on strike, needs a big raise.
None of it is true, of course.
The truth is the first casualty of war, and right now, education unions and Ford are at war.
Let’s deal with the idea that Ford has been cutting education, a false premise based on both funding and the number of teachers, ECE workers and others in the system.
In the 2017-18 school year, there were 125,980 teachers plus 9,054 early childhood educators overseeing 2,020,301 students. Now we have 130,923 teachers, plus 10,072 early childhood educators for a student population of 2,025,258. We’ve gone 16.1 students per teacher in 2018 to 15.4 last year and the government is still hiring more people.
In 2017-18, the total education budget was $29 billion, it’s now more than $32 billion with spending increasing every year and hiring increasing every year as enrolment is flat.
Now, let’s talk about the contract...
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