TORONTO -- The 73,000 elementary teachers in Ontario's public schools must accept a 12 per cent pay hike over four years by the end of this month or they'll see that offer reduced to four per cent over two years, Premier Dalton McGuinty warned Wednesday.
The offer would see the top salary for elementary teachers grow to $94,000, but McGuinty said it would expire Nov. 30, and school boards would then be given only two per cent more to negotiate deals with teachers' unions.
"There's no extra money," McGuinty said. "I think we've all got to keep in mind what's happened to our economy.
"If we're able to land those kinds of agreements with the overwhelming majority of the sector, then I would appeal to those who have yet to see things the way that everybody else is to come to the table. Let's get this done."
The Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario said the Nov. 30 "artificial deadline" was accepted only by teachers at Catholic and French schools in Ontario when they reached so-called framework agreements.
"If they chose on Nov. 30 to remove supports for public elementary students in this province, then the responsibility is theirs, not ours," federation president David Clegg said in an interview.
"The only way to solve this is to begin with a commitment on the part of the government to acknowledge the gap in funding."
The federation has been complaining for years about what it says is a $711 per student gap in provincial funding between elementary and high schools, and maintains that's the real issue in the current dispute, not salaries.
Education Minister Kathleen Wynne said the offer of a four-year, 12 per cent salary hike also contains other provisions to help address that funding gap, such as the hiring of more teachers for grades four through eight, but like McGuinty she also warned it will expire at the end of the month.
"The Nov. 30 date is a realistic date in terms of boards needing to know what money they have to work with and us wanting to get on with the delivery of programs to kids," Wynne said.
"It's been clear what happens on Dec. 1 that if there isn't an agreement, the boards know that they will get two per cent for salaries and they won't get some of the other provisions, and then they'll have to bargain local agreements without the benefit of those provincial provisions."
Those provisions don't amount to much, Clegg complained.
"They are so minimal as to really be the reason why in fact the talks broke down," he said.
"If you were to extrapolate what they are investing, it'd take 30 years to reduce class sizes (in grades four to eight) to the size they are in secondary schools."
The New Democrats said the government isn't speaking to the teachers' real concerns about the funding gap between elementary and high schools.
"Clearly for the elementary teachers' federations to be holding out this long, they are saying the government is not addressing their issues," said NDP education critic Rosario Marchese.
"The government is sticking to its line, saying `they got enough,' and they obviously hope that the teachers will buckle by the end of the month."
