This article was previously published in the Toronto Sun

Imagine you were negotiating the purchase of a new house. You’d make an offer, the house owner would counter and back and forth you would go. Further imagine that you’d already given notice to your landlord that you were moving out of your apartment and needed to be out by the end of the month. In that scenario, you might be inclined to pay a bit more to get the house and move in right away. You don’t have time to quibble over the nickels and dimes – time is money.

Now imagine this same scenario, but with one difference: the home owner was paying you $500 a day to negotiate the deal in order to compensate you for your time. In that scenario, it might be worth holding out, pushing the homeowner for a better deal and arguing over the nickels.

No home seller in their right mind would do this.

But that’s essentially what the Ontario government has done during contract negotiations with the teachers.

A leaked copy of the agreement between the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF) and the province has revealed a $1 million dollar negotiating payment from Premier Wynne and Minister Sandals to OSSTF.

Specifically, clause nine of the agreement states: “The Crown shall pay to OSSTF the sum of one million dollars ($1,000,000) to offset the cost of collective bargaining no later than ninety (90) day after the ratification process.”

The OSSTF deducts dues directly from the taxpayer-funded paycheques of its 60,000 members. These dues are supposed to pay for collective bargaining – the raison d’etre for the unions. But this time around, it seems the tab was picked up by the taxpayers for both sides of the table.

The union could have paid this million dollar cost of bargaining for $16.60 per union member, but why would they when the public can be forced to pay?

Minister Sandals has responded to the leak by stating that “it is not unusual to provide support with the costs of central bargaining.” But typically, this would relate to the cost of lost salaries. It would not normally include the cost of a long and acrimonious bargaining process.

What remains to be seen is whether the Catholic and French teachers unions received the same kind of payouts.

But this isn’t just about waste – it’s about incentives.

By agreeing to pay for the union’s negotiation costs, the union no longer bears any of the financial risk of throwing up road blocks in the process. The union can afford to act petulant in the negotiations, and the taxpayers are stuck paying twice.

At the end of the day, Minister Sandals and Premier Wynne are the ones responsible for creating an overly complex multi-level bargaining system, and for removing the unions’ financial responsibility for paying their share of the negotiations. If the union bears none of the cost of refusing to negotiate, they can afford to hold out.

As always, it is parents, students and taxpayers who suffer with reduced resources, job action, and ever increasing teachers’ salaries. And now, even paying the other side to hold out.