Chinese parents clash with striking Canadian teachers as school year fails to start
Websites linked to masked protesters disappear in wake of ugly scenes in Vancouver, as school year in British Columbia enters third week without classes
PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 16 September, 2014, 3:26pm
UPDATED : Wednesday, 17 September, 2014, 2:21am
Ian Young in Vancouver [email protected]
Members of a Chinese activist group, the BC Parents' Federation, clash with rival pro-union protesters at a rally in Vancouver on Sunday amid a strike by teachers in British Columbia. Photo: Twitter
Members of a parents’ group forged within Vancouver’s Chinese community to oppose an ongoing school strike have gone to ground after they gatecrashed a rival teachers’ union rally and were involved in angry scuffles.
Members of the British Columbia Parents’ Federation (BCPF), some wearing surgical masks, unfurled a large vinyl banner carrying their group’s name in English and Chinese as they attempted to march on a larger rally outside the Vancouver Art Gallery in support of the industrial action on Sunday.
The dispute has lasted three months and has seen pupils in British Columbia go more than two weeks without classes since the new school year was due to have started.
Members of the British Columbia Parents’ Federation (BCPF) attempted to march on a larger rally outside the Vancouver Art Gallery in support of the industrial action on Sunday.
There were shoving and shouting matches between BCPF members and union supporters, before they were separated by police. In the hours after the ugly incident was shown on CBC news, websites associated with the BCPF went offline.
The BCPF did not respond to multiple e-mailed requests for an interview. However, in a statement posted on Sunday on Chinese web portal Lahoo.ca, the group urged the teachers’ union to immediately end the strike.
“Under the BC School Act, students’ entitlement to education is a right. Today, this right has been blatantly violated,” the statement said.
“Because of the teachers’ strike, more than 500,000 students have been locked out of school causing great disruption to public schools.
“Not only has the strike impacted students and parents in BC significantly, it has also incurred great financial loss to over 13,000 international students.”
The dispute has lasted three months and has seen pupils in British Columbia go more than two weeks without classes since the new school year was due to have started. Photo: CBC
Dr Justin Tse, an academic who has studied activism within the British Columbia Chinese community, said that although the BCPF’s desire to get children back in class was shared with other opponents of the strike, there was also a strong undercurrent of anti-unionism in general that ran through the protests.
“My sense is that there is a view that unions disrupt business, and most Chinese migrants have this view that unions get in the way of the free market,” said Tse, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington. “For them, it’s not really just the educational stuff – it’s the union stuff.”
The BCPF has garnered supporters via Chinese-language social media, and the couple of dozen members at Sunday’s protests all appeared ethnically Chinese. The federation has attempted to widen its outreach to non-Chinese parents, but these efforts appear to have been aborted, for now. A Facebook page and an English-language website seeking new BCPF members were visible on Sunday, but were taken offline that night.
“A lot [of Chinese immigrants] are kind of scared of public protest,” said Tse. “They want the media to capture their numbers at a protest, but they don’t want to be singled out as individuals, so you get the face mask thing. You can’t really have it both ways, but that is the sentiment.”
Tse said conservative Chinese political activism in BC was informed by “a specific vision of democracy” that focused on majority rule alone, without emphasising some of its other aspects, such as deliberation, consensus and accountability.
“There is this sense that democracy means you get to say your private views in public, no matter how outrageous, because that’s free speech, and that it is all about getting numbers,” said Tse. “This view is that democracy just means majority wins, majority rules.”
The BCPF protest came in the wake of a meeting called last Thursday by two local Chinese groups, the Canadian Alliance of Chinese Associations (CACA) and the Canadian Community Service Association (CCSA). According to an account in the Chinese-language World Journal, both organisations urged parents to “actively voice their opinions … while voting in elections for politicians who can speak for Chinese communities”.
There were shoving and shouting matches between BCPF members and union supporters, before they were separated by police. Photo: CBC
CCSA vice-president Harris Niu said the strike “had not only compromised the quality of education in British Columbia but had also tarnished the province’s international reputation”, World Journal reported.
The CCSA’s board is made up entirely of mainland Chinese immigrants, mostly businessmen, according to its website. It once placed a large advertisement in The Vancouver Sun praising Beijing’s “magnificent” work governing Tibet.
Among the BCPF protesters were some of the same people who vocally opposed the Vancouver School Board’s adoption of a new policy on transgender students in May. They included Charter Lau, a prominent Hong Kong immigrant and social conservative who has previously sought election to the Burnaby School Board.
On Friday, The Vancouver Sun reported that a delegation of parents had asked the Chinese consulate to intervene in the strike. Consulate officials reportedly met representatives of the education ministry to relay the parents’ concerns.
A tentative deal to end the strike was reportedly reached between the BC Teachers’ Federation and the provincial government early yesterday, but neither side immediately confirmed the deal announced by a mediator.
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Survey shows split in BC society over teacher’s strike
Chinese-speaking parents are far more likely to blame the teachers’ union than the provincial government for the ongoing school strike in British Columbia, according to a survey.
The views revealed by the Social Insights poll last month put the Chinese community at odds with broader British Columbian society, which was more likely to believe the union had done more than the government to end the strike, another poll found.
“This finding paints a different picture from what has been reported in the media from most British Columbians,” said Sonny Wong, a partner in Social Insights. “The sensibilities of the Chinese community are different and should be observed.”
Social Insights surveyed 313 Chinese-speaking British Columbia residents via the WeChat Chinese messaging platform. It found that 39.4 per cent of respondents put most of the blame for the strike on the BC Teachers Federation, while only 3.9 per cent put most of the blame on the government.
In contrast were the results of an Insights West poll of 800 British Columbia residents conducted for CTV over the weekend, which asked which side had done more to end the dispute. Forty-eight per cent favoured the BCTF, while 21 per cent sided with the government.
Teachers are seeking higher pay and smaller class sizes.
Social Insights found that 98 per cent of its Chinese-speaking respondents were either concerned or very concerned about the strike.
The longer a respondent had been living in Vancouver, the more likely they were to blame the teachers’ union for the strike, Social Insights found. Of those who had lived in Vancouver for five years or less, 29 per cent primarily blamed the union; of those who had lived in Vancouver 16-20 years, that rose to 58 per cent.
Students protest against the education dispute in Vancouver on September 2. Photo: Xinhua
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