Editor:
Our provincial government has offered $40 per child per day to the families of B.C. if its dispute with the teachers drags on into September and October.
This money, this misguided PR gesture, is supposedly meant to mitigate the problems associated with the shutting down of the public school system.
It beggars belief that our provincial cabinet, made up of intelligent and resourceful individuals, came up with this solution to a festering problem.
Truly, the mountain has laboured and brought forth a mouse.
Have these individuals forgotten they were elected to govern? Isn't it part of their mandate to see to it that important and critical services are delivered to the people?
I suppose that in the future if there is a similar dispute with firefighters the government will offer citizens money for water buckets and tall ladders. And if the dispute is with our police, the government will offer citizens money so they can buy guns for selfprotection.
This $40 bribe is nothing more than an attempt to mollify a public that simply wants the schools open and the children in classrooms doing what they should be doing.
The government has been demonstrably intractable and mendacious in this dispute and is cloaking itself in the mantle of "fiscal responsibility" while conveniently forgetting the billions it has spent on the Olympics, the millions it pays to its CEOs and the obscene increases it has granted to its appointees and high-level civil servants.
Meanwhile, it cynically places responsibility on the shoulders of its puppet negotiating team and pretends this is some sort of third party conflict. Not very hopeful.
But then again, things might fall into place as per some pre-conceived master plan. Who knows?
However there is one thing we can be sure of while all this is going on. The cabinet ministers, the MLAs, the policy makers, the advisors, the negotiators (both sides), etc. will continue to receive their generous compensation packages, uninterrupted, while the masses, teachers and parents will have to scramble to maintain their households in some sort of order.
Oh, thank heavens for that $40!
Frank Buonanno
