The main education unions put on a dishonorable spectacle this week in parliamentary committee: by defending tooth and nail the relevance of amnesty clauses in their conventions, they clearly meant that the confidentiality of their members’ files was worth more than student safety.
These outbursts of inappropriate corporatism surfaced this week during the study of Bill 47 (Act to strengthen the protection of students), which the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, defended in the National Assembly. Before the minister, the Autonomous Federation of Education and the Centrale des syndicats du Québec in turn praised the essential nature of amnesty clauses, which ensure that disciplinary sanctions imposed on members of school staff disappear after a time.
“Extremely concerned” by the high number of sexual misconduct occurring within the supposedly secure walls of the school, Minister Drainville does not intend to waver on this point. He is absolutely right.
If Quebec legislated on the basis of catastrophic presumptions, we could understand the protective reflex of the unions, taken aback by artificial interventionism. But the reality is quite different: an investigative report on the treatment of misconduct at school, ordered by the minister after a series of media revelations shocked Quebec, instead showed that sexual attackers seemed better protected than students at school and moved from one school center to another, accumulating offenses without their disciplinary record, erased after a certain time, being passed on to future employers. A real scandal!
Nothing, absolutely nothing, can justify the duty of precaution applying to members of staff guilty of having committed an offense to the detriment of children, to aggressors whose past alone should have prevented them from passing through the door of the school. Employers of school staff cannot rely on Google to track down a troubled past.
The unions, blinded here by a duty to protect their members which makes them lose lucidity and a sense of justice, must rectify the situation and accept that the disciplinary files of school staff members can follow them throughout their career. It’s a question of honor.