The Night Before Judgement Day

This afternoon I heard an interview with Jinny Sims, the president of the BCTF. From it, there were two very interesting points:

1. She hasn't budged one iota from her original statement that her BCTF union members will stay out on their illegal strike until the government resumes negotiations.
   
2. She lied about the number of teachers who voted to go out on this strike, originally citing 80%. The number has now been revealed to be about half.

On paper, Jinny Sims seems to be a well educated person. She has at least two post secondary degrees and seems quite literate. But her continued rhetoric today reveals that she has likely never taken a course in Calculus, nor History.

Calculus is an advanced form of mathematics that quickly reveals where one is heading, no matter where one currently happens to be. But she seems in denial of the fact that tomorrow her union, her leadership, and her members are going to get severely smacked by the Supreme Court of B.C. Not only have they completely disregarded the judge's previous order to get back to work, but they have adamantly said that they have no intention to follow the law. The judge has reviewed the union's financial books and most legal minds feel that the penalties the BCTF will start accruing tomorrow will be harsh. Even without any penalties, they are reportedly paying out $2 Million per day to their members in strike pay.

While I can actually put myself in the position of the teachers and understand what they're saying about this being "unfair", Lesson #1 in life is that things are not always fair. Who I feel the worst for are my teacher friends. They care, more than a lot, about their profession and the kids they teach. None of them went into teaching to make gobs of money. They just want a decent work environment where they have half a chance to teach effective lessons every day. But as class sizes have grown substantially, lots of new students barely speak English, and textbooks are years out of date, they've become more than a little frustrated. I understand these sentiments, more than they realize. But, as I told them from the outset, they backed the wrong horse. And when they, collectively, decided to illegally strike, I knew the outcome was going to be disastrous for them. But even if they had voted 'No', what choice did they have but to join their colleagues on the picket line? It's easy for the rest of us to say, "Stand defiant against those you disagree with" but we don't have to work with their colleagues for years and decades to come.

As for Jinny Sims, I said long ago that in her own mind she obviously views herself as a crusader, in the same league as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi. To most any neutral observer, she is a pathetic little opportunist who is a PR person's worst nightmare. And when it comes to big, public labour battles like this one, the outcome is almost always decided based on public opinion. It doesn't help the BCTF's cause that they publicly tried so hard to defeat the Liberal provincial government in the recent election ... and they lost. They spent millions of dollars and they lost! In an ironic repeat of that, they have once again spent millions of dollars and are about to lose again. I don't know how much each teacher's union dues are but I've heard they're quite excessive. If I were a teacher I would be more than a little angry about how my hard earned wages have just been wasted once again.

So back to that other course that Sims obviously never took: History. If she had paid attention to recent history - namely the NHL strike - she would have realized what fate awaited her for being as rhetorical and stubborn as Bob Goodenow was. So Jinny, as the Vancouver Canucks hockey fans often sing in the dying minutes of a game, " Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye!"