The president of the FAE Mélanie Hubert gave a fine example on Tuesday of this detestable union flaw, the eagerness to defend its most rotten members.
It is The duty who noted this passage from Mme Hubert in parliamentary committee in Quebec for the study of Bill 47 aimed at strengthening the protection of students1.
This bill follows the media coverage of cases of violence and misconduct (particularly sexual) committed by staff towards students.2. Example: a teacher who resigns from school center X during an investigation into allegations of inappropriate behavior with students can be hired in the neighboring school center without his new employer being informed of the investigation.
The problem is that the confidentiality of employee files prevents the transfer of these disciplinary files from one school service center to another.
It’s completely crazy, of course, but welcome to the surreal world of Quebec labor law.
Consider, for example, that after 12 months, the sanction received in an employee’s file generally no longer exists. This is called “prescription”. So, if you are sanctioned in 2024 for bad behavior which earned you a note on your file in 2022, the employer cannot take the 2022 offense into account: it no longer “exists”. Your file is “blank” and you must sanction accordingly… As if it were a first offense.
I explained to you the absurdity of this disciplinary invisibility cloak in 2021 based on a case involving a school janitor with wandering hands3. I explained my exasperation at the unions’ eagerness to defend its most rotten members.
Let’s move the cursor forward to 2024. Union leader Mélanie Hubert is therefore in Quebec to testify on Bill 47. Minister Drainville wants, precisely, the disciplinary files of school staff to be “transferable”. So that school center That sort of thing…
This is too much for the president of the FAE.
I quote the article from Duty :
In its brief, the FAE asks to “delete” an article from the bill which would prohibit clauses having the effect of “preventing a school service center […] to take into account a disciplinary measure” which has previously been imposed on an employee, in the spirit of grading sanctions. “We must still have the right, to a certain point, to be able to mend our ways. The principle of a disciplinary measure is to give a warning and to tell people: ‘mend yourselves and correct yourself,'” argued M.me Hubert.
When they justify the defense of comrades who have committed stupidities, the unions have a ready line: Yes, but the law requires us to do so! Very good, but in the case of Bill 47, Mme Hubert wants the law to continue to protect problematic elements. Even the janitor I was talking about in 2021 had union defense for his slip-ups… For ten years.
Mme Hubert illustrates through the absurd this absolute and all-powerful reflex of the union defense of the most rotten. It is absurd and counterproductive that a school center does not have access – in the name of sacrosanct confidentiality – to the disciplinary file of a candidate who until very recently was employed by another school center…
The future law 47 carried by Minister Drainville, inspired by absurd cases reported by the media, aims to plug this gap. To protect students.
It is neither extreme nor cruel. However, it is too much for Mme Hubert. A union member since 1988 tells you: unions have several qualities, but they are too often too happy to serve as a shield for bad apples.
Does the FAE’s position support the protection of students? I doubt.
I end with an anecdote that I consider revealing. I’m going to tell it until I retire. In 2015, I investigated for The Press4 on a teacher with delusional behavior, in a school in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. These were parents who contacted me, after having failed to have her punished or, better, to have her expelled.
The teacher publicly humiliated her students by laughing at their mistakes in front of the whole class. She took out her cell phone and pretended to call the parents of students she considered late, in front of the whole class.
The teacher shouted at the students, inflicted disproportionate punishment, ordered homework that she did not correct, took photos of the children without permission…
I am talking here about children aged 1D year… Some of whom had a stomach ache at the idea of having to go to his class.
The Montreal School Board had known about it for years. The whole school team knew about it. All the neighborhood was aware: the legend of this teacher-fury was reaching the ears of parents in neighborhood parks and daycares before their children even started attending school!
I had traced parents of former students who had complained as early as 2001 about the follies of this teacher. I contacted former students, now adults, who told me about the abuse they suffered in this teacher’s class.
This teacher had been fiercely defended by the Teachers’ Alliance for years. Defense of the union? I paraphrase the substance of my discussions with union officers: the employer only has to put together good disciplinary files if he wants to dismiss teachers…
The derogatory phrase “Parents at this school expect service like in a private school” was also said to me by a union officer during an off-the-record conversation.
Finally, after the publication of my column, there was a miraculous development in this matter!
The problematic teacher did not return to this NDG school for the 2015-16 school year.
Problem fixed ?
Nope…
I later learned that she had been moved to another neighborhood in Montreal, a so-called disadvantaged neighborhood, within the same CSDM.
But the punch is not even in this surreptitious displacement of the problem, as the Church did with its abusive priests in the past, no, the punch is that the teacher ended up becoming a union representative in her new school.
I rest my caseYour Honor: unions have no problem defending bad apples, even though they sometimes make them union officers.