Letter to the Editor

I’ve been reading and listening to coverage of the B.C. election campaign with interest, and a growing sense of astonishment.

Columnists like Tom Fletcher from Black Press are raising the issues that underline this election, but are framing them in a manner that is disingenuous at best, and deliberately misleading in some circumstances. There have been personal innuendos, if not outright attacks against some candidates, and a sense of “backing the right horse” for others, by reporters at both local and provincial levels. Some candidates are simply ignored altogether if they aren’t going to provide the desired split in votes.

Fletcher states in his column “Political parties square off on schools,” that “regardless of who wins the May 9 provincial election, there will be millions more dollars and thousands more teachers entering the public school system.” He glosses over the court case instituted by the BCTF after Christy Clark, then Minister of Education, introduced legislation that stripped class size and composition language from all B.C. contracts. Instead he focused on how the “ruling BC Liberals moved quickly to end 15 years of bitter conflicts in the courts and on the picket line.”

They had no choice! They committed an illegal act and would be held in contempt of Canada’s Supreme Court if they did not apply the appropriate remedy. It took the SCC 20 minutes to hand down a bench decision that normally takes months to decide. And what did this cost you, the taxpayer? Millions of dollars, as the Liberals stubbornly pushed their appeals forward through the court system, after losing the first two decisions. Millions of dollars that needed to be spent providing fully-funded public education programs to our children and grandchildren.

Mr. Fletcher slaps at BC Teachers for their political activism and ads that refer to 15 years of cuts, responding with “In fact the B.C. education budget has risen each year, despite declining enrolment in most districts over the past decade.”

The budget has indeed risen each year, but not even by the two per cent required by our district to meet the costs of inflation. Our district worked very hard to comply with the slow starvation to its funding, without cutting its fine arts programs for students, or closing more schools than it absolutely had to. And when they stayed within their budget, and managed to produce a surplus they could use the next school year, the Liberals clawed it back into provincial coffers and changed much of their funding into temporary grants that could only be relied upon for that school year.

Fletcher touts the Green Party’s wish to bring in an expansion of the full-day Kindergarten program to include three and four year olds, but neglects to mention that the large number of school closures across the province during the Liberal reign has now come up against consistently increasing enrolment caused by a growing baby boom, and the reinstatement of the stripped class size and composition numbers. We will have difficulty finding room within our present structures, without finding room for younger children. SD5 is still in a much better position to do so than some at the Coast that found savings through short-sighted school closures, however, our district’s request for funding to replace Mount Baker Secondary School in Cranbrook may well be pushed further down the list as the province struggles to meet the logistics of additional classroom space.

Tom Fletcher does not report the issues under guidelines of journalistic ethics and principles that were in place in times past. He is a paid employee of Black Press, and a representative of their political views and agendas. It’s time to question the Conservative organizations, agendas and viewpoints that seek to drive us. Time to get out and vote this May 9.

Wendy Turner,

Cranbrook

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