Students Need Their Own Voice

In Ontario’s illegal teacher’s strike, students have been used as pawns by both sides, pushed back and forth and used as human shields, in order to accomplish each side’s goals. Both the government and the unions claim that the reason for striking illegally or pushing through a controversial bill is to help the students. But is that really true? Ontario students are standing in front of Queen’s Park today to say that neither the government nor the teacher’s unions can speak for the students.

The Ontario Teacher’s Federation has been running radio ads across Ontario, claiming that the teachers are out on the picket lines “for your children”. However, if some thought is given to what the teacher’s unions have been saying, even before the strike, it is clear that the teacher’s unions have the interests of the teachers at heart. This is obvious. Teachers belong to unions because they need an organization to look out for their interests and lobby the government to see their point of view. They are concerned about Bill 160 because it threatens to eliminate thousands of teaching jobs. That’s because teachers pay dues to the union. Without dues, unions can’t survive. Less teachers = less money for the unions. Of course, most teachers also feel that Bill 160 will harm students, because they genuinely care about the kids they teach. However, it is misleading to claim that the teachers unions speak for the students. No students are members of the union. No union heads asked the students for their input. It isn’t fair to say that the strike is for the good of the students when no one bothered to ask them what they thought was good or bad.

But the unions aren’t the only group using the students as means to an end. The government plans to give Ontario residents a 30% tax cut. This cut must be paid for by reducing the funding used to provide social services and programs, such as health care and education. The government plans to cut more than $650 million from the Ministry of Education and Training’s budget, and has refused to commit to put the money saved back in school budgets. This means that the money cut from Ontario’s schools will most likely go to finance the tax cut. Many of the programs proposed in Bill 160 to improve education will save money, such as by using “uncertified” teachers and by reducing prep time (To be fair, some will cost more, such as increasing the amount of time spent in school by students). What the students here today object to is that programs which are being sold to the public as ways to help school kids and improve education are, in fact, ways to accomplish a tax cut.

It is easy to see that both the government and the teacher’s unions of the province of Ontario have mandates to carry out, and axes to grind. That is nothing new. What is new, and objectionable to the students at this meeting, is that both sides of the education issue use “the good of the students” as excuses and justifications for their actions. The students here today don’t want to be used as pawns. They don’t want to be used to solve other people’s problems (especially people who walk out of the classroom illegally, or cut money out of schools to pay for tax cuts without admitting it). Ontario’s students, especially the ones on the lawn of Queen’s Park, just want to go back to school.