TORONTO - Hopes that Ontario's 73,000 public elementary teachers would accept the same four-year framework agreement as the rest of the province's teachers were dashed Saturday when an extended deadline passed without a deal, leaving a much smaller contract offer on the table.
Minutes before a midnight deadline last Sunday, the Elementary Teachers Federation returned to bargaining to avoid seeing a four-year, 12.55 per cent wage offer reduced to a two-year, four-per-cent package and were granted a five-day extension to accept the deal.
A "bitterly disappointed" union president David Clegg said Saturday the Public School Boards Association pulled the plug on the talks when the new midnight-Friday deadline passed without an agreement.
Clegg said the main issue for the teachers had always been a $711-per-student funding gap between elementary and high schools in Ontario -- not salaries -- and expressed frustration the union's last offer was rejected.
"We offered to take a zero-per-cent salary increase in the fourth year, so those tens of millions of dollars could be used to hire 1,500 teachers across the province," Clegg said in an interview.
"We did that thinking it was in the best interest of students -- it was certainly in the best interest of the economy -- and the school boards flatly refused to contemplate that."
The school boards countered that even with no salary hike in the fourth year, the teachers' offer would cost the province an extra $270 million and said the union simply waited too long to get back to the bargaining table after walking away in May.
"It was just not enough time," said Rick Johnson of the Ontario Public School Boards Association.
"We spent the first three days this week just doing numbers. We were under strict instructions that there was no more funding available."
Education Minister Kathleen Wynne said there were offers and counter-offers that in the end were not acceptable to both sides, so an $800-million, four-year package for the elementary teachers has been reduced to about $268 million over two years.
"What's unfortunate to me is that there was $800 million on the table, in this economic climate, that that wasn't enough for everybody to find a deal," Wynne said in an interview.
"I'm not going to apportion blame. It takes two parties to come to a resolution and it takes two parties to come to an impasse, and that's where we got to."
There will be no further talks on reaching a framework agreement for the elementary teachers. Instead, each ETFO local across Ontario will have to negotiate a new contract with their local school board.
"They'll have the two per cent and the teachers have to understand that the boards are only going to be able to bargain with the money that is flowed to them," warned Wynne.
"We've been very clear about that all along."
Clegg said the school boards association had relegated public elementary students to "second-class status" by rejecting the teachers' offer, which in turn meant the province yanked the $800-million offer that had included extra funding for teachers' prep time and other enhancements.
"We can't understand why any group of school board trustees in this province would turn down 1,500 more teachers at more cost to themselves, understanding that those new teachers would be paid for out of prospective salary increases of current teachers."
The Progressive Conservatives have said the government's offer to the teachers was far too generous, while the New Democrats said the province is failing to address the funding gap that has upset the elementary teachers.
Late last month, Ontario's 31,000 public high school teachers accepted the same four-year framework agreement that Catholic and Francophone teachers had agreed to in the spring, which will bring top salaries to over $94,000 by the end of the contract.
