Dear Editor: re Articles on OECTA and the YCDSB, Feb. 1,2.
I follow your coverage of the education system. You are too polite when describing teacher roles and motive.
Is there a school board that works to the satisfaction of the parents whose taxes support their existence? In York Catholic, Teacher Union bosses want to silence an elected trustee, Frank Alexander. His offence? He is doing his job as a Catholic, in a Catholic School Board, as he promised and took an oath that he would.
Let me in simple language. Every product and system today has an Operating Manual (a guidebook of instructions for How and Why) provided by the Founder/Manufacturer. For Catholic Schools, that Operating Manual, the guidebook for Catholics, is what you call the magisterium – the Bishop/Pope. The Law of the land says so: the Human Rights Code confirms it, as your paper repeatedly affirms.
If teachers, or parents for that matter, do not like the How or Why of their job, they can (i) turn to the magisterium to change the Operating Manual, see archbishop@archtoronto.org or (ii) go to a non-Catholic Board for a job. Their Operating Manual may be the Human Rights Code.
The “offended person” has an Operation Manual as a recourse. An organization, like OECTA, cannot seek redress to either the magisterium or the human rights code … it is not a human.
However, if there is an employer/teacher “infraction of the rules”, then the Collective Agreement applies. The issue is no longer a matter of the individual teacher’s “human rights”. It is a labour grievance matter.
Labour grievance matters are handled by the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB), not the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Undermining the trustees’ Magisterium Operations Manual destroys the employer’s ability to manage Catholic education.
The savaging of Frank Alexander, a member of a visible minority and discriminating against four Italian-Canadian trustees would likely lead the OLRB to consider decertification of the union.
It seems to this humble servant that the Union instructed their lawyer, Cavaluzzo Law, to avoid the OLRB and to [mis]misrepresent this entire episode as a violation of a single teacher’s alleged rights.
Membership fees are being raided so the Union bosses can engage in scorched earth lawfare against their employer.
Ennio Torre
