Let’s make some money!

You know we really don’t understand what all you parents and teachers are upset about! You’re complaining all over social media, being so critical of all the wonderful changes we have planned for the education system in B.C. You make it seem so personal! We wish you could see that it’s nothing personal, it’s just business.

Let us just tell you a bit about how business works. It’s all quite simple, you see.

We all participate in a capitalist economy, the kind of economy that thrives when corporations make profits. Now, profits are based on economic growth which comes from investing in places that yield profits.

Unfortunately, since the 2008 recession, growth worldwide has slowed down… you must have heard about this on the news? But the good news is that one of the “sectors” that is still ripe for investment/growth/profit is the “education sector” as the billionaire Rupert Murdoch calls it.

What’s so annoying and frustrating though is that standing in the way of corporations making profits in this “sector” are old fashioned institutions like unions! The BCTF has for many years been fighting the privatization of education in the province. So annoying!

And, by the way, we really don’t understand why people think that public education should be free in the first place! Why should public funds be used for public education? That’s such a stupid idea! We need public funds to stimulate the economy.  It’s public funds we use to bail out corporations that stop making profits. We need to keep helping them! Can’t you see that?

If you could just do your own research, you will come to see that what we’re doing is the best thing for our province.

One corporation that studied how much money could be made in the education sector was Cisco Systems. They came up with this very helpful document. In fact Cisco’s document was so helpful, we incorporated a lot of ideas from it into our BC ED Plan.  No one seems grateful for all the taxpayer money we saved by doing that! We didn’t have to do all that research and writing ourselves! That would have taken so much more time!

Apart from looking to corporations for guidance on how to re-design our education system, we’ve been working really hard to try to save taxpayers money by cutting funding for expensive things like school  librarians and school psychologists.  We’ve saved about $4billion from the education budget since 2002. It was so helpful to have that extra money for the 2010 Olympics! That was fun, wasn’t it?

Oh! And, can we please get some gratitude for our  BC Jobs Blueprint,  our plan to re-engineer education in the province? People should be so happy that we will be ensuring that children are thinking about careers right from kindergarten! Children will no longer have to waste time in classrooms learning about things like visual arts or poetry, or music or anything that will not directly train them for working in industries like LNG. Isn’t that great?

Teachers like to go on about how they educate the “whole” child, intellectually and socially, But, with our plan, it will be parents who will be teaching their children about things like healthy lifestyles and media literacy. We’ve been tweaking all curricula so that complicated things like the environment have been taken out and we’ve put in lots of stuff relevant only to working in industries like LNG!

With all the courses that will be only available online (thanks Cisco!) parents will be spending a lot more time with their children! That’s so good for families!  All parents will need is a really good computer and reliable access to the Internet.

And, can you see how the need to regularly upgrade your computer to keep up with new technologies will provide lots of profit for corporations? Another good thing for our economy! And don’t worry about the cost of all that software – we’ve negotiated with corporations for great deals …

So please, stop the hysteria! It’s not a conspiracy! We actually really like children…we just think that turning children in public schools into pre-workers, starting in kindergarten, is the best thing for our economy.

After all, the real worth of a child is in their potential to buy stuff so that corporations make more profits, but we should not forget their potential also to pay taxes too so that there can be more public funds to ensure that corporations keep making lots of profits.

Of course we don’t want corporations to pay a lot of taxes and that’s why we’ve been cutting corporate taxes over the past decade so that all the profit they make will trickle down to everyone. You’ve all benefitted from that trickle, haven’t you? We certainly have with all those donations to our election campaigns!

So why don’t you just stop all that whining! We really are doing what’s best for the economy. Forget all that stuff about free access to public education being important for democracy. Forget all that stuff about a citizen’s duty to contribute to the common good. Forget all that complaining about Charter Rights! Let’s just make some money!

Kind regards,

Your BC Neo-Liberals,

Working hard to put Families First!