Ontario’s teachers are furious with the McGuinty government for legislating a two-year teacher wage freeze and cutting fully-paid sick days from 20 to 10. Perhaps they should be thanking Premier McGuinty for not going further.
Teachers who rallied against the wage freeze at Queen’s Park recently carried signs thanking the premier, sarcastically, for “throwing us under the bus.”
One full-day kindergarten teacher at the rally even told a reporter
she felt like she was living in North Korea. Of course, in that socialist utopia, average annual incomes are less than $2,000.
In Ontario, the average industrial wage is just shy of $47,000 a year, having grown at a rate of roughly 2.5 per cent over the past four years. Teachers, on the other hand, surpass $72,000 in earnings after seven years on the job,
and about half of Ontario teachers earn $95,000, the top of the scale. That compares favourably with
British Columbia, where top teachers earn $81,000, or Quebec, where they earn $72,000 - and very favourably with North Korea.
Of course, the cost to Ontario taxpayers is much higher.
Add in nearly $1,200 of employer contributions to employment insurance, $2,300 of employer contributions to the Canada Pension Plan,
and $7,800 in contributions to the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. Add in prescription drugs and extended medical, dental, wellness counselling, laser eye surgery, and the cost of half of Ontario’s teachers tops $110,000 apiece.
Once we finish adding, we need to start subtracting, because teachers don’t work 50 weeks a year, or 49, or even 48, like most Ontarians. Even after the premier cut their paid sick days from 20 to 10, teachers are only expected to actually be in the classroom for 195 instructional days.
Of course, teachers can’t educate a student alone. Ontario’s full-time kindergarten program, for example, mandates that every kindergarten teacher have a full time teaching assistant in the classroom. (It’s not clear whether kindergarten students in North Korea have $200,000 of teaching talent in the classroom with them like they do in Ontario, but it’s probably unlikely.) Taxpayers must fund a full complement of support staff: principals and vice principals, librarians, counsellors, teaching assistants, secretaries and custodians. Between 2002 and 2010,
Ontario school boards added 24,000 teachers and support staff to their payrolls, even as student enrollment fell by 120,000 students. And payroll costs consume 76 per cent of the province’s education budget.
From 2002 to 2010, the annual cost of educating a student in Ontario rose from $7,201 to $11,207, an increase of 56 per cent.
In 2007, before the financial meltdown, the McGuinty government delivered a $600 million surplus with revenue of $104 billion.
In 2012, with projected record revenue of $112 billion, the government is forecasting a deficit of $15 billion, thanks to runaway payroll costs.
Ontario universities continue to graduate 7,600 more teachers every year than there are teaching vacancies to be filled. Young teachers know a good deal when they see one – they want a piece of the action.
Ontario taxpayers can’t afford to pay school teachers double the average industrial wage. The government’s two-year wage freeze doesn’t go nearly far enough to bring education costs into line.
Gregory Thomas, Federal and Ontario Director, Canadian Taxpayers
