Wynne Liberals can’t keep their excuses straight as bill for union payments grows

Make mine medium-rare

The effort of Kathleen Wynne’s government to avoid acknowledging the impropriety of its relationship with the teachers’ unions would do credit to a rookie contestant on Dancing with the Stars. It twists, it turns, it ignores, it obfuscates. This is political denial as high art – the Cirque de Soleil has nothing on Ontario’s Liberals.

The performance is necessitated by several factors: the revelation that the Liberals paid millions of dollars to the unions while supposedly negotiating as adversaries; the secrecy surrounding the payments and the growing size as leaks continue; the inability of the government to get its excuses straight as ministers and the premier try out various, sometimes contradictory, explanations; and the reluctance of a government long in the tooth and mired in arrogance to admit to yet another expensive mistake.

Wynne was reduced to insisting “I’m not tone deaf” Monday as more revelations about self-serving relations between her government and the unions continued to spill out. “We have to remember that for years and years there were 72 school boards making these decisions,” in place of the centralized process put in place by her Liberals, she said. The fact the new process has proven slower, clunkier and far more expensive than anyone expected is just something voters are supposed to swallow. Unfortunately for Wynne, the size of the meal keeps growing: from $2.5 million paid to three unions when the news broke a week ago, the figure quickly grew to $3.7 million, and on Tuesday was reported to be as high as $7.1 million.  (more...)

Wynne Liberals can’t keep their excuses straight as bill for union payments grows

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