OPPOSE BILL 22

The B.C. Liberal government is using legislation to circumvent collective bargaining. That’s the manner by which this purportedly democratic party, this avowedly pro-family premier and her ministers are dealing with the impasse in negotiations with B.C. teachers. It is by the way, an impasse generated by an outlandishly wrong-headed handling of educators, offering no increases of any kind and numerous other demands for concessions by teachers. There are matters of great importance to teachers, such as class sizes and staffing levels which are being disregarded; and matters that are important to boards of education, such as teachers’ evaluations and management control of the workforce are receiving attention through Bill 22. One would be right to say Bill 22 is a subversion of a bargaining process.

All of us who believe that education of our children and grandchildren is of paramount importance and who also believe that educators are valued members of our society and who make invaluable contributions to our families and our society need to do what we can to encourage our government to seek a resolution to this bargaining impasse, a resolution that respects free collective bargaining and addresses the range of issues that teachers and boards of education are passionate to discuss.

The solution is certainly not one by which the government dictates the outcomes. Resentment is the only resultant outcome of such action.

I believe that the public have to be more than merely listeners to news but proactively telling our government to get it right. Deal fairly and equitably with the teachers who daily invest their lives in the betterment of our families.

A Father’s Day Tribute - HE IS A LEGACY. HE DIDN’T JUST LEAVE ONE.

A NEW LEARNING
Here I am sixty-six years of age and I am remembering my father. I’m glad. He was memorable. Such an ordinary man but unforgettable. He is forgotten to the company for which he worked for forty-five years. He is not thought about within the church he attended for sixty years. I call him to mind often. That makes sense. As time passes, I do things that resemble him sometimes. At ninety-three years of age he was gone one evening last May. I miss his face. I miss him. I am delighted to say that.

A small man at five feet six inches in height, my father had three sons each of whom exceeded his stature. Yet as small boys, we saw him as a big man. How pleasurable it is now to recall that even in our adult years he was large in our hearts. He served in the Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. He and Mom operated a post war coffee shop and a gas service station in a Prairie town. Then believing that opportunity existed in the east, Dad and Mom began again in Ontario and Dad took a factory job. Some years after he retired from his demanding physical work in a furnace manufacturing factory he answered this question. “Why did you keep working so hard at that place?” “I did it for my boys, “he said. Life’s purpose and responsibility was not more complex than that for Dad. Three boys grew up, gained and education and made him proud. We gave him daughters in law whom he loved and six grandchildren and they provided him with nine great grandchildren.

He loved our mother with all his heart for the sixty-five years they were together before he lost her to illness. He encouraged and assisted her entrepreneurial career. He was a man of faith and he was content. He was satisfied with the simple pleasures that a small income afforded to him. He never fulfilled two dreams, a trip to Hawaii and fishing in Alaska. Dad always loved ice cream. When I was six years of age Dad and I walked to an ice cream store. We were no sooner around the block finishing our cones when he said to me, “That tastes like more doesn’t it?” We turned around to acquire two more cones. I was ten years old when Dad operated a commercial crane 130 feet off the ground. He spotted me outside the company fence to which I had peddled my bike to watch him. He looked around and then motioned for me to come through the hole in the fence and I scampered up the long ladder into the cabin of the crane to sit with him until closing time. We remember him jingling coins in his pocket. He whistled familiar songs and we knew the world was good. He could yodel but few people were privileged to hear it.

He inspired my brothers and I to be dedicated Dads and we have sought to model faithful fathering to our sons who are now young dads themselves. They are doing it, perhaps better than we did. Thank you Dad. You live on.

(printed in The Cloverdale Reporter June 19, 2009, http://www.bclocalnews.com/opinion/48292882.html)