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The Citizen, 2019-04-25, Page 5Other Views Our responsibility? The whole story Few people want to pay the price Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense In this week’s edition of The Citizen, there is a story detailing the local public school board sending out redundancy forms, a regular part of any school year cycle. The way it works is that, every year, due to budgetary concerns and projected enrolment, some teachers in every school board are determined redundant with the hope that they can be brought back the next year. However, if you read some stories that came out in the past couple of weeks, you might not be aware of that practice. You might think that, because this is the first time it’s being covered, these redundancies are a direct result of the education reform undertaken by the provincial government, led by Huron-Bruce MPP and Minister of Education Lisa Thompson. Before I get any further here, I’m not defending those cuts, nor am I saying that any of these teachers don’t deserve the same kind of job security that most people enjoy. I’m not defending those decisions, and as anyone who reads this column regularly will know, I’m actually frustrated with a lot of what’s coming out of Queen’s Park. That said, as journalists, we’re responsible for telling the whole story, not just jumping on the bandwagon with a pitchfork and fanning the flames of ignorant anger. When we get information like numbers on redundancy notices, we can’t just print what we’d like from it to fit the narrative of the day. It’s our responsibility to dig deeper, or use knowledge we already have, to give the context behind those numbers. I have a number of friends who are teachers or who trained to be teachers. Actually, I have a lot of extended family members who are teachers as well. I know about redundancies, and how, while not nice, they are an annual reality for teachers lower on the seniority list. That’s why, when we first heard about the local redundancy notices, I didn’t immediately jump up to write a story about them because, while many boards are facing higher-than- normal numbers, that doesn’t mean it’s tied to education reform. The impact of those reforms won’t be known until later this year and attributing them solely to Thompson’s education reform is irresponsible. In the Avon Maitland District School Board, 69 of approximately 400 secondary school teachers received notice that they were redundant for the coming year. That’s higher than most years, but that doesn’t mean that all 69 of those people will not have a job in 2019/2020. It also doesn’t mean that those redundancies are solely based on the cuts being made to education: we’re in a board with declining enrolment, and redundancies are a reality in a situation like that. As the story says, there are a lot of bridges to be crossed before anyone knows, locally, what will happen to those 69 people. So until then, it’s irresponsible to make assumptions based on, at best, conjecture. I’m not blind to the fact that, due to education reform, other boards have gone past redundancy notices and laid people off in preparation for the cuts, however I can tell you, thanks to the research I did, straight from the horse’s mouth, that isn’t the case in the Avon Maitland District School Board. I’m under no illusion here. I know that there will likely be a significant amount of those 69 teachers not returning to work as a result of the education reform, however, to act like it’s already happened, especially if you’re a journalist, is, again, irresponsible. Those 69 people are our neighbours, our customers and our friends and we need to remember that when the campaign trail starts again. So to my fellow journalists out there: do the research, present the context and tell the full story. To our readers, before you tell someone about a story, click “Share” on social media, or decide to comment on a story, make sure that you’re sharing the full story. Use those critical reading and thinking skills and ask some questions before you spread a story. I’m not making these requests because there’s some kind of competition about who can write the best story. The real reasons every journalist needs to give the full story and every reader needs to think critically are numerous. The number one reason is that it makes it difficult to tell the full story when other reporters haven’t. Every time a story that isn’t covering every angle goes to print, it makes it that much more difficult for the real story to get told. Secondly, journalism is under attack in this world. “Fake news” is such an oft-declared sentiment, whether in jest or not, and the idea that news media does anything but present the facts is a pervasive one that hurts our ability to do our jobs. Lastly, and this is a personal issue, it is exhausting “having our hands” forced professionally. Something like the redundancy notices could have gone without comment until more reliable and concrete information was available. However, because other outlets decide to tackle the story, and do so half- heartedly, we here at The Citizen have to pick up the pieces. Read and write responsibly. Denny Scott Denny’s Den THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, APRIL 25, 2019. PAGE 5. ...unless there aren’t There are always two sides to every story. Many actually say there are three sides (two sides and the truth). As journalists, it’s our job to remind everyone that there are two sides to every story... unless there aren’t. Those of you who read my column last week will remember the legal seminar Citizen Publisher Deb Sholdice and I attended, learning about the ins and outs of being a legally-compliant journalist in today’s world. One of the hallmarks of telling a story properly is hearing from both sides. Not only is it good journalism and well-rounded storytelling, it’s also legally encouraged. A few weeks back when we reported on the hundreds of students who walked out to protest changes to Ontario education, it was important to reach out to Huron-Bruce MPP and Minister of Education Lisa Thompson for her take. Whether readers were picking up what she was putting down or not – a quick visit to The Citizen’s Facebook page illustrates that there was some doubt – is a different story. The Citizen does its best to fact-check on the fly, but if someone in a position of power comments, that, in itself, is reportable news. In this week’s Looking Back Through The Years, there is a story from 2009 reporting that Huron County was already seeing the effects of climate change. This article wouldn’t have been breaking news even then, but it reported that temperatures at a Blyth weather station had steadily increased over the previous 46 years. Yet, here we are 10 years later with many around the globe (we’ll get to that later) who still deny it. Whether it’s U.S. President Donald Trump attempting to discredit climate change or Premier Doug Ford challenging anything that protects the environment (when people choose to believe rich children who were handed already-successful businesses over scientists, you know things are upside down), many are prepared to ride this planet off a cliff if there’s a buck in it for them. Other than reporting that someone is a climate change denier, the subject has become one journalists feel that, in good conscience, they shouldn’t report the “other side” of because the science really is undeniable. An historical example of baseless debate would be Holocaust denial. Journalists don’t leave the door open for debate as to whether the Holocaust happened, because it’s something that’s beyond reasonable debate. In fact, many nations have enacted laws against Holocaust denial. Speaking of the world in which we live, you’ve no doubt heard that the whole flat earth thing is making a comeback. This is, again, beyond debate. Just because thousands think they can effectively travel to the ends of the earth (trust us, we’d like you to as well) it doesn’t mean it’s credible. Even the Flat Earth Society boasted about its members “around the globe” in an ill-informed Facebook post that still inspires laughter on the internet today. Another increasingly tiresome issue is the war on vaccines. Thanks to hordes of people who trust the health of their children to the mind of 1994 Playmate of the Year Jenny McCarthy as opposed to the collective wisdom of the doctors of the world and the World Health Organization, we’re seeing the return of diseases that had mostly died out in the era of stagecoaches or even earlier and their ignorance is putting all of us at risk. When you’ve been proven wrong and don’t have a leg to stand on, yet cling to debunked ideology, avoiding truth like the plague (which still exists by the way – thanks anti-vaxxers), then your voice doesn’t deserve a platform. The ongoing rancorous debate over the Ontario government’s budget demonstrates once again that everybody wants something from government – they just don’t want to pay for it. Even those who claim they simply want government to get out of their way, still want government to protect their property through police and fire services and want things like good roads and garbage collection. Just the same, they resent every penny the government takes from them to pay for such essentials. On the other side of the argument, there’s nothing wrong with most of the services the previous Liberal government delivered that the current Progressive Conservative government is cutting, it’s simply that people weren’t willing to pay for them through higher taxes. The solution for the previous government was to give us good things for “nothing” – leaving it to future taxpayers to pick up the tab by paying off the deficit that paid for the goodies. Governments at all levels will always seem the bad guys. Every time we get a paycheque and see the lump the government takes for income tax or the Canada Pension Plan, we see the cost of government. Every time we buy something and see the HST the federal and provincial governments add to the cost, we feel the resentment of how much less money we have to spend for the things we’d like to buy. When it comes time for an install- ment of our municipal taxes, we write a cheque of uncomfortable size to support our municipality, the county government or school boards. But because there’s never a price tag attached so that we associate the services we receive from government with the taxes we pay, we tend to take all this for granted. When the snowplow goes down the road in winter, we don’t see a sign that says this piece of equipment cost so much to buy and costs so much every day to operate. Students don’t bring home a bill to parents at the end of the school day that says “Educating your child cost ‘so many dollars’ today”. We take for granted most of the good things we get from government. The only time we don’t is when the government picks up the tab for something we used to pay for ourselves. When medicare was introduced in the 1960s, people knew how much they used to pay to visit a doctor or to go to the hospital to deliver a baby. We knew how vulnerable we were to being impoverished by some serious illness or accident that would send us to hospital for an extended stay. We were darned grateful to the government for paying these bills and guaranteeing that we’d get proper health care even if we couldn’t afford it. But that was 50 years ago. Even those alive in those years mostly take our government-provided health care for granted by now. If we visit the doctor, we haven’t a clue how much that cost the system, let alone if we need cancer treatments or heart surgery. Sometimes I think we should receive a statement at the end of each year saying “Your healthcare cost the government ‘so much’ this year”. But that won’t work either. Take the example of those employer-provided benefit packages many people are fortunate to have covering everything from drug costs to dental care to even things like massages. These are an insurance plan but how many times have you heard someone say, “Well I wasn’t getting my buck’s worth so I decided to get some massages”. People whose employers grant them sick days to insure them against loss of income due to illness often say “Well I had sick days coming to me so I booked off to go shopping in the city for a day”. We don’t seem to understand the concept of insurance. We want to be covered against catastrophic loss, but we also want to “get our money’s worth” in all the other years. For long periods of our lives my wife and I have paid far more towards healthcare than we got back, but there have been a few years when we couldn’t afford to pay the huge cost because some special illness hit us hard. Those tax dollars we’d “wasted” in our healthy years now saved our bacon. In Ontario we’ve gone from one extreme to another – from a government that spent money it didn’t have to a government that gives tax breaks that cut its own revenue then claims it must cut important programs because it doesn’t have the money to pay for them. Our confused relationship between taxes and government services goes on and on. Nobody likes to pay taxes and certainly we must be on constant guard to make sure our tax dollars are sensibly spent. On the other hand, so many things we depend on to enjoy our rich lives in Canada depend on taxes that support government. It’s stupid to hurt ourselves by not being willing to pay for these good things. Keith Roulston From the cluttered desk