Just Stop Breaking The Law

By Mike Archer. The government of British Columbia is starting to sound an awful lot like the City of Abbotsford in its unwillingness or inability to obey the law.

Finance Minister Mike de Jong tried to change the topic on the teachers strike over the weekend by claiming it was all about corporate tax rates. Not sure where that red herring came from but, if having the government obey the law means increasing corporate tax rates then I’m not sure we should be saying it’s OK for the government to break the law on the basis of keeping corporate tax rates low.

According to a report obtained and published by Global News last week, “A court ruling at the centre of British Columbia’s protracted teachers’ strike, which has delayed the school year for half a million students, robs the government of its ability to set education policy, the province argues in documents related to an upcoming appeal.”

In other words: If the law gets in the way of doing what you believe, ignore the law.

There’s a problem, of course, which a child in kindergarten would understand.

Governments are not allowed to break the law. Pure and simple. The ideologues* in Ottawa, Victoria and Abbotsford don’t seem to understand the concept of obeying the law.

Sorry Christy – If you must break the law in order to govern the way you want to govern that means you can’t govern the way you want to govern. Pure, simple and easy to understand.

Stop breaking the law.

If you believe the BC Supreme Court erred in finding your government guilty then wait for the appeal to run its course and live with it. Inserting a clause in the teachers’ contract which would negate the results of the appeal if you lose it is nothing more or less than bargaining in bad faith, which is exactly what the BC Supreme Court found you guilty of.

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