The Globe and Mail

The game of chicken being played by British Columbia’s Education Ministry and the Vancouver School Board will mercifully end this week. And depending on the outcome, embattled trustees will either be unemployed martyrs or angry, embittered servants of the people, determined to make life hell for a government to which it acquiesced.

For the last few weeks, the two sides have been engaged in a messy and loud public-relations war. Inside city limits, the fight between school board chair, Patti Bacchus, and the Minister of Education, Margaret MacDiarmid, has been fairly lopsided.

Ms. Bacchus is a skilled and passionate communicator. She has artfully positioned herself and her board as champions of public education, a group that only wants what’s best for children. The chair has been able to portray her adversary, Ms. MacDiarmid, as a somewhat heartless and uncaring technocrat who is preoccupied with the bottom line to the detriment of the educational needs of kids.

Elsewhere in the province, however, the situation is regarded a little differently.

All 60 school districts in B.C. have been involved in the unpleasant task of finding ways to submit balanced budgets to the government, something they must do by law. This, of course, is the exercise at the heart of the dispute in Vancouver – the school board says it can’t submit a balanced budget without making deep cuts in programs and services that will have a lasting negative impact in the classroom.

The board says there is a $17-million shortfall between its costs and the money the government is prepared to give it. This discrepancy led the government to ask the province’s comptroller-general to conduct a review of the board’s finances. The report concluded there was plenty of room to make cuts that wouldn’t hurt the quality of education.

The findings amounted to a scathing indictment of the board’s policies and practices. That made Vancouver trustees even angrier.

Their counterparts around B.C. have become fixated on this fight. Most have already gone through the gut-wrenching process of submitting a balanced budget to the ministry. It’s never fun. It inevitably involves making a series of unpopular choices.

Imagine the optics if the government acceded to the pressure being exerted by the Vancouver School Board and gave it the money it needed to address its funding shortfall. It would be a decision virtually without precedent. The repercussions would be felt for years. The outrage it would spark across B.C. would make the Liberals even less popular and re-electable than they are now.

The fact is, there is not a lot of sympathy for Vancouver’s predicament outside the boundaries of the district. A couple of issues illustrate why.

In her report, the comptroller-general said rents the Vancouver board was charging groups to use its buildings were far below the fees other districts had imposed. Some of those user groups include non-profits running before-and-after-school daycare centres. Hiking the rent, the comptroller argued, would help offset the funding gap the district is experiencing.

But the board is reluctant to raise the rents because, as one trustee wrote in a local paper Monday, the cost of child care for many parents in the district would have to go up dramatically. You can guess how that could be perceived by those living outside Vancouver; the board wants the province to subsidize families’ child-care costs.

It’s understood that many families in Vancouver are carrying sizable mortgages to pay for the high cost of housing. But why should a taxpayer in Burns Lake or Kamloops or Sooke help subsidize daycare for some of the country’s wealthiest people, living in some of the nation’s most expensive homes?

If the government is going to do that, it had better be prepared to subsidize daycare right across the province.

The Vancouver board is also in a financial jam, in part, because years ago it introduced junior kindergarten even though the province wasn’t funding it. Junior kindergarten is a wonderful idea. I’m sure every district in the province would love to have its own program. But most don’t because there’s no money to pay for it.

So how could the government ever give the Vancouver board dollars to run a nice-if-you-can-get-it program that the ministry doesn’t fund anywhere else? It would be political suicide.

My guess is the Vancouver board will submit a tentative balanced budget to government later this week, while trumpeting the district-wide devastation it will cause. And when it does, there will be trustees everywhere delighted that a somewhat privileged district can feel their pain.