No deals for public school teachers as countdown nears

OTTAWA — The countdown to midnight Monday will herald not only an end to 2012, but also to the time set aside for school boards and teachers’ unions to reach local agreements.

Yet as the deadline nears, there is faint hope such a thing will occur in Ottawa.

Negotiations ground to a halt long before schools let out for a two-week holiday and there’s been no progress since.

“There really is nothing at the moment,” said Harvey Bischof, the vice president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation.

Same goes for the Ottawa-Carleton Elementary Teachers’ Federation, whose members walked off the job for one day last month.

Tentative agreements reached between the Ottawa Catholic School Board and two of its bargaining units — occasional teachers and caretakers/tradespeople — have been submitted to Education Minister Laurel Broten for approval.

Broten’s office also announced Sunday that it reached a template deal with the Canadian Union of Public Employees after an additional 30 hours of discussions — and in time to beat Monday’s midnight deadline for agreements with teachers and support staff.

Provincewide, CUPE represents about 55,000 workers, including educational assistants, early childhood educators, instructors, custodians, librarians and secretaries.

Ottawa’s Catholic school board has two CUPE locals, while the public school board has none.

CUPE Ontario president Fred Hahn says the union remains opposed to Bill 115 and will continue its campaign to repeal it, which includes a legal challenge. The union says its leaders will vote on the tentative deal Jan. 5 and if it’s approved, a ratification vote will follow in the weeks afterward.

Broten says the government is prepared to give CUPE’s union locals and their school boards another 14 days past Monday’s deadline to allow time for the votes to take place.

Broten has continued to urge the unions to use the final days of the year to keep trying to reach agreements with local school boards before the deadline.

“This recent agreement demonstrates that it is possible to find solutions when we remain focused on putting students first,” she said in a statement.

She has also called a press conference for Thursday to lay out the government’s next step.

There were no details available on what she will do, but imposing a contract, which Bill 115 gives her the power to do, is likely given both she and Premier Dalton McGuinty have said such action would occur if deals weren’t reached first.

Bischof said the CUPE deal doesn’t turn up the pressure on OSSTF to reach a deal of its own, adding the specifics contained in the unions’ respective collective agreements are quite different and that has an impact on negotiations.

“It’s impossible to tell what the differences were that made it possible for them reach an agreement where we couldn’t,” he said.

The OSSTF asked its members before the holidays whether they would support a one-day provincewide political protest, but won’t release the results of that poll until after union leaders meet next week.

If a contract is imposed and members thus lose right to strike, the only tool left besides a political protest will be the ongoing and complete withdrawal from voluntary services, Bischof said.

But, he added, he can’t predict what Broten will do come Tuesday.

“Whenever it seems like there’s a fairly sensible course to follow, she goes off in a different direction,”

With files from The Canadian Press

mpearson@ottawacitizen.comTwitter.com/mpearson78