The price of (relative) stability
By Cody Lind (he/him), Local President, Bulkley Valley
We fought hard for what we have. The trouble is that “fine” has become its own kind of obstacle.
I grew up being told not to complain: Cody, be grateful for what you have. Finish your dinner; there are starving children in Africa, you know. In my family you did not name your own troubles when someone, somewhere, had it worse. You inherited stability and you were grateful for it, or you were guilted into something that looked the same. It took me a long time to see that guilt is not gratitude, and that it keeps you quiet in a way real gratitude never does.
Newer BC teachers work inside a version of this. For those of us that joined the BCTF since the last strike, we inherited something real: a restored contract, a working pension, benefits someone else fought hard to win. And we absorbed the message that came with the inheritance: Be grateful. Don’t squander it. Don’t complain.
So we don’t. The rent is too high, the classroom is too full, the IEPs keep multiplying, but the contract exists and someone older than you will always remind you what it looked like before. Things clearly aren’t good enough to celebrate. They aren’t bad enough to walk off the job. So you file it under “fine,” and you get back to work.
That verdict, “fine,” is more durable than real satisfaction could ever be. Satisfaction can be broken by a crisis. “Fine” absorbs crises and recalibrates around them. I have come to believe it is the single biggest obstacle between BC teachers and the collective capacity we will need in the next round of bargaining.
I joined the BCTF in 2021. I have seen no job action. My pay is reasonable; my benefits are good. Things are “fine.”
Two stories meet at the same word
It would be easy to call this complacency and leave it there, but that is only half of what is happening and the wrong half to lead with.
Two forces hold “fine” in place. The first is the inherited story: be grateful; things used to be worse; someone fought for this so don’t squander it. It tells you not to complain.
The second is simpler and harder to argue with: exhaustion. Teachers are spent by 3:30 p.m. on a Tuesday. The bandwidth it takes to think about bargaining, attend a general meeting, or read a union magazine is consumed first by the 27 kids in the room, the IEPs, the report cards.
Exhaustion is not apathy. Teachers are not disengaged because they don’t care, but because there is nothing left at the end of the day to spend beyond it. Still, it produces the same result as apathy: withdrawal from collective life. A workforce too tired to engage in its union, told all the while to be grateful it has one, ends up accepting the present conditions. The system benefits, even if no one designed it that way.
Here the two forces lock together. The inherited gratitude gives the exhaustion a respectable name. It lets “too tired to fight” pass quietly as “things are basically fine.” One supplies the story, the other the reason you can’t act on it. “Fine” is the word where they meet.
Disengagement is what happens to a teacher. Demobilization is what happens to a union when enough teachers disengage at once.
Meanwhile the working conditions have not stood still. Violence in schools is increasing. LOU 12, the language that restored class-size and composition limits, is not achieving its intended effect. We have not yet built the collective capacity to act on conditions we already know are unacceptable. We could probably keep living with that, the way you live with anything you have filed under “fine,” as long as the next round of bargaining looks like the last one.
I have come to think it will not.
The pattern behind the strikes
The first sign came in my first year as a local president, when job action seemed to be everywhere I looked. Air Canada, Canada Post, Alberta teachers, the BCGEU in our own province, were all on the picket line. I wondered whether I was simply paying closer attention, whether becoming a union person had rewired my news feed.
It wasn’t just me. Plotted over the past decade, Statistics Canada’s count of public-sector days not worked becomes a hockey stick.1 Something had shifted.
The harder question was why. A semester of reading across economics, law, and political science turned up three forces: motive, means, and battlefield.
The motive is economic. Multiyear agreements signed before inflation spiked could not absorb what came after 2021. Real wages fell mid-contract, and expired deals sent workers back to the table with years of catch-up to demand and tight labour markets giving them leverage. The cost of staying quiet had become visible.
The means is legal. Between 2007 and 2015, three Supreme Court decisions, the first of them BC Health Services,2 established that collective bargaining and the right to strike are protected under Section 2(d) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Unions that once had almost no recourse against back-to-work laws now have constitutional standing. The BCTF knows this terrain. We spent more than a decade in it.
The battlefield is strategic: escalation between employers and unions. Governments reach for back-to-work legislation and essential-services designations. These are contestable, but the challenges take years while the orders bite immediately, so unions escalate in turn. When Air Canada flight attendants defied a federal back-to-work order in August 2025, they forced the airline back to the table, though the wage fight still ended in arbitration.
So some governments escalate again, reaching for something nearly incontestable: the notwithstanding clause. Ontario tried it on CUPE education workers in 2022 and retreated only when other unions threatened a general strike. Alberta used it in October 2025 to end the largest teachers’ strike in the province’s history, imposing a rejected contract, barring teachers from striking until 2028, and threatening fines of $500 a day per teacher. Once reserved for emergencies, these tools now define what researchers call permanent exceptionalism: the extraordinary as routine bargaining strategy.3
Closer to home, the BCGEU spent eight weeks on the line, the longest public-service strike in BC history, and the deal that ended it barely clears inflation. It set the pattern the rest of the public sector, teachers included, has now settled into. Even a union willing to walk out for two months landed close to treading water. The rest of us did not walk out at all.
Picture where that leaves teachers: gains inherited rather than won, no job action in over a decade, exhausted by 3:30 p.m., locked in until 2029.
Alberta has shown other governments that bargaining processes can be undermined by legislating first and negotiating later. The capacity to meet that eventuality must be built now, while things are “fine,” not when it arrives.
So now what?
This evidence is correlative, not predictive. It does not tell us where BC is headed, only that the bargaining environment has shifted, the tools have escalated, and the next round could open in a tougher climate than this one.
So I am not going to ask the most depleted workforce I know to summon some abstract reserve of collective will. That is exactly the ask this whole piece argues people can’t meet. Building collective capacity does not start with heroics. It starts small, and it starts now.
It starts with knowing your local’s prior-ities for the next round and filling out the bargaining survey instead of letting it sit in your inbox. It starts with showing up to one general meeting this year. It starts with naming the gaps or the incidents in your classroom, in writing, to your local, instead of absorbing it as the cost of the job. It starts with one conversation with a colleague newer than you about what “fine” is actually costing them. None of that requires anger or spare energy you don’t have. It requires refusing, in small and repeatable ways, to file the unacceptable under “fine.”
None of this is only about the next round. Standing up for a genuinely equitable public education system is worth doing because it is right, not only because the numbers say a fight is coming. But principle does not bargain a contract. Capacity does.
Maybe you’re not tired yet. It is only fall. But you know what the year does to you, that bone-deep exhaustion only teaching produces. The conditions driving it will not improve on their own. They will be bargained.
Our will to act has gone slack over a long stretch of stability. That stability was worth fighting for. But “fine” is not the same as enough. So build the will back now. Before anyone is angry enough to demand it of us. Before the table is already open. Before we are the ones who cannot withstand the fines.
Bargaining does not start at the table. It starts here.
1 Statistics Canada, “Table 14-10-0352-01: Work stoppages in Canada, by jurisdiction and industry based on the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS)”: doi.org/10.25318/1410035201-eng
2 Health Services and Support – Facilities Subsector Bargaining Assn. v. British Columbia, 2007 SCC 27, [2007] 2 S.C.R. 391.
3 L. Panitch & D. Swartz, “Towards permanent exceptionalism: Coercion and consent in Canadian industrial relations,” Labour/Le Travail, 13, 133–157, 1984.
