I suspect there are dartboards with Province columnist Jon Ferry’s face on them in most public sector union offices in British Columbia—and his Friday piece won’t make any of them any happier.

Ferry revealed that the B.C. Teachers Federation, those nattering nabobs of net zero negativism, have in fact offered their own office union workers a (oh, delicious irony!) net zero contract.

From Ferry’s column:

Unionized staff of the B.C. Teachers' Federation have rejected a net-zero wage contract offered them by their teacher union bosses despite the BCTF's own bitter opposition to the net-zero mandate imposed on it by Victoria.

The Teachers Federation Employees Union, representing some 140 BCTF workers, said two-thirds of its 120-odd members who voted by secret ballot Thursday rejected the proposed two-year deal, which would have frozen wages but improved benefits and working conditions.

TFEU president Peter Valbonesi told me the BCTF offer was similar to one that the Canadian Union of Public Employees recently negotiated with the B.C. Public School Employers Association for school districts.

He said it actually reduced costs. And he personally favoured the offer, which the BCTF executive presented to him about a month ago.

"They came to me with the offer and said verbally this is what we would like to do, and I said, 'Well, you'll have to put it in writing,'" he said.

Valbonesi noted that unions representing 75 per cent of B.C. public-sector workers had come to similar net-zero deals with Victoria.

 This is the same BCTF who viciously criticized MLAs for taking cost-of-living increases (which they didn’t—budget legislation has frozen MLA pay from 2010 through 2013), while offering teachers net zero.

And it’s the same BCTF who want a 15 per cent pay raise over three years—twice the rate of inflation. That’s coming off a contract that saw a 16 per cent pay raise over five years, plus a $3,700 signing bonus.

In the famous words of Doc Holliday: Apparently, Wyatt, my hypocrisy knows no bounds.