Letter to the Editor

On the Emergency Rally to Support Education Workers

I am a retired teacher who joined the emergency rally yesterday organized by the Ontario Federation of Labour at the Ministry of Labour in support of the education workers who are defying the Ford government's Keeping Students in Class Act.

There must have been at least 3,000 people there and the spirit was defiant. There was a tremendous sense of unity and I noted that besides hundreds of education workers there were many teachers, nurses, migrant workers, students, postal workers, steelworkers and also parents. The fighting mood was very palpable. As one union leader said, quoting Martin Luther King Jr., "One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."

I am writing in appreciation of the TML Daily that was distributed yesterday and the two fine articles, one by Enver Villamizar and the other by Pauline Easton. I was struck by the concept of "police powers" and how governments across Canada are acting above the law or using the law for unjust and illegitimate causes. The use of the notwithstanding clause in the Canadian Constitution of 1982 by the Ford government to table the Keeping Students in Class Act in order to criminalize and attack the education workers is unconscionable. I appreciated the point made in the Easton article that the notwithstanding clause in the Constitution enables governments to "legally" attack the rights of workers and this is a political matter that belongs to everyone and that it will take all of us Ontarians to solve this problem by putting forward our claims and fighting for them.

Let us all keep the initiative in our hands and fight together for the rights of all as the TML Daily urges us to do.

A Reader in Toronto

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This article was published in

Volume 52 Number 40 - November 2, 2022

Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmld2022/Articles/D520402.HTM

Website:  www.cpcml.ca   Email:  editor@cpcml.ca