You don’t get to say NO!

children go to school

I’m sorry but you don’t get to say no. You don’t get to hold 500 000 children hostage without consequences. You don’t get to ignore the law. You don’t get to spend millions of dollars of public funds on the spewing of lies and distortions and misinformation without being called to account.

Does the echo chamber you live in prevent you from hearing the sounds of the widespread dissent to your actions?  How much longer do you plan to ignore the voices of hundreds of thousands of people who provide the money that pays your salary?

You are public servant.

You are supposed to serve the people.  You are especially supposed to act on behalf the most vulnerable people in society, our children.

What have you done for children lately?

You have done nothing about childhood poverty. You have denied parents help with daycare. You have instead chosen to spend millions keeping children out of school.

I cannot understand how anyone would want that to be part of their legacy: that they kept children out of school deliberately.

Do you remember what you learned in Socials 11?

Did you not study the role of citizens in a democracy?  Do you understand your teacher explaining to you  that the very thing that separates a democracy from other kinds of governance is precisely that citizens have a say in the way they are governed?

Did you not write an essay or do a project on “How Citizens Can Influence Government” If you need a refresher the question and the answer key is available on the MoE website under Past Provincial exams.

Here’s your cheat: Citizens should participate in a democracy and also influence government by voting in elections, by responding to public opinion polls, by joining a political party, by joining a pressure group, by writing letters to the editor and sometimes by engaging in civil disobedience.

Those are the things that ordinary citizens can do but some citizens are more powerful than others. These citizens can hire lobbyists to do this work for them. These lobbyists are usually former members of government who know the ins and outs of how government works. They have an important list of phone numbers. They have drinks with the people that “matter”. They get paid millions of dollars for this work. Amounts of money that ordinary citizens can’t afford but corporations can.

How much influence on this government have lobbyists for mining corporations had? How much influence have they bought through election campaign donations? Through paying lobbyists to convince a politician to vote a certain way? Through publishing “reports from “think tanks”

We may not have millions of dollars but there are millions of us who you ignore and we are tired of it.

We are tired you allowing mining companies to treat our province as a dumping ground for their waste after they have extracted resources that hardly contribute anything to our collective wealth.

We are tired of you readily finding money for corporations while hundreds of thousands of children starve.

We are tired of being told that we just don’t understand fiscal policy and that the only way we can pay for a quality education for our children is through the raising of taxes.

This is yet another of your many outright blatant lies and distortions as many have continually pointed out.

I realize that Plato gave politicians permission to lie because he said that ordinary people would just not understand why things had to be done in certain ways.  I bet he did not have 41 000 educated teachers in mind  back then.

We understand quite clearly that you have distorted democracy. Your government is not representative of the people it governs. Your government behaves as though the only people it is responsible to are corporations or the affluent. Your government acts as though it is above the law.

You are not.

You don’t get to just say no.

8 thoughts on “You don’t get to say NO!”

  1. Reblogged this on Shawn L. Bird and commented:
    Well said.
    Personally, I think that BC having the lowest corporate tax rate and high child poverty is absolutely shameful. If any members of this government are able to sleep at night, they’re the lowest mite on fleas on dead dogs.

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  3. This is more than disgusting. Since there are more and more people on your side since the courts showed the Government acted illegally ( and again) I hope this will be reflected in the elections wherever one of the intransigent ministers stands.
    Hugs

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  4. I agree with above letter. This government is about themselves and what they can get from us! Enough is enough! Our children have a Constitutional Right to an Education which this current government has blatantly taken away from them! As parents we have a right to have our children get the same education as those in private schools! Teachers, nurses, ambulance personal, fire fighters, police officers, social workers and anyone who works in the public sector deserve proper wages!

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  5. The teachers have had the opportunity to go back to work and end this strike since the start of September when the Government said they would lift their lockout and twice asked the teachers to end their strike and go back to work. So saying that the Government is the only one holding the 500,000 kids hostage is a false statement…a downright lie. The teacher’s had the opportunity to go back to work and continue negotiations. Instead they chose not to go back. I’m not fully blaming the teachers OR the government for this mess. The whole dynamic of the teacher’s vs the government in the province is messed up and needs to change. Over 50 strikes (affecting all those kids) in 40 years. Multiple times being legislated back to work by the government in order to get the kids back in class. Both sides need to change. Perhaps it may be time for the government to be voted out but I think it is also time for the teachers to get rid of the BCTF and find new leadership.

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    1. Anyone who doesn’t know that the government was orchestrating the whole debacle hasn’t been paying attention. If you think the teachers were the ones holding up the process, or in any way responsible for the strike, then Clark’s spin doctors have earned their paychecks yet again.
      In a situation as convoluted as this one the easiest way to figure out who’s responsible is to find out who’s done the most wrong things. It takes about a minute in this case.
      Above and beyond everything else, the Government totally ignored a court order. Do you think you would be allowed to ignore a court order? Do you think it’s okay for our government to thumb their noses at the law by ignoring a court order, twice? Don’t you think if the government had done what the Judge ordered them to do, twice, that the teachers would have stayed in class?

      And when you hear people grumble about the settlement reach and how the teachers got this, that, and the other, remember the $150,000,000 Christy Clarke threw away trying to buy parents loyalty at $40 a day.

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  6. RBrad, teachers can not go back to work as long as E80 is on the table. The government has not been negotiating this last year, it only pretended to do so. It wants to impose E80 which is a “out of jail card” for them after braking the law (twice). It is wrong and illegal, again! Wake up! Don’t believe all the lies that they feed the media.

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