If you have this Greek tragedy at Queen’s Park figured out, you might be smarter than the rest of us. It seems to be a battle of choruses. And you can only tell the players apart by the masks they present to the audience.
We know that this current conundrum has something vaguely to do with educating Ontario’s children. Now if we could also educate the educators, the politicians and the public, all would be clear.
What we do know is that our children are being held for ransom by the teachers and if the teachers do not get what they want, our children will suffer. Parents will be angered. Politicians will be blamed. The only problem with this is that these teacher choruses wear many different masks and we have no way to know what it is they want.
Politicians also wear different masks and the three major choruses at Queen’s Park snipe at each other, pointing fingers at each other. There is no lack of blame being distributed.
Some of us remember those halcyon days when the teachers and the ruling party were close and loyal friends. Teachers paid much money to vilify the Conservative leader. They did such a good job for their Liberal friends that the Liberals were returned to a majority government. That meant that the Liberals no longer needed the teachers.
And now they are not friends. They have turned their backs on each other. They do not communicate—except through the news media. The news media do not understand anything either and are not helpful.
Those of us watching this fiasco unfold know quite well that none of this mealy mouthed concern for the children matters to the protagonists. It will be the first to recognize that this is not the way to win friends or influence voters, that starts to make sense of the situation. It might take a superhuman effort but someone has to put their brain in gear and come down to a 12-word condensation of what this fighting is about.
And if they are smart enough to do that they might also propose a 12-word solution to the problem.
The alternative is to having the situation fester for the next three years and we can end up with a new government that nobody thought possible. And then we will only have ourselves to blame.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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