ON 16 May 2001, British Columbians elected a Liberal (in name only) provincial government on its promise to begin A New Era in B.C.'s notoriously bizarre political culture. The government quickly declared that the province's management would embrace the profit principle and rein in special interest groups, including teachers. Having captured 77 of the 79 seats in the legislature, the Liberals appeared ready to take managerial prerogative to new levels. It would be hard to exaggerate the contempt with which the British Columbia electorate booted out its two-term New Democratic Party provincial government. Any acknowledgment of the NDP government's achievement since 1992 was erased from the public memory, with more than a little help from the hostile media. Mind you, the former government was quite capable on its own of fueling its critics' wrath. Former Premier Glen Clark was forced to resign for allegedly accepting a quintessentially Canadian kickback from a constituent. No yacht, no stock options -- just a wooden deck tacked onto the former premier's modest suburban home, built by an appreciative neighbor looking for a zoning concession for his casino. With its former leader facing criminal charges, the party's slide in the polls accelerated at warp speed. Thus the Liberals would probably have been elected on a one-plank platform: we aren't the NDP. Yet they campaigned on the promise of massive tax cuts and spending restraint. Soon-to-be Premier Gordon Campbell swore that health-care and education spending would be protected, indeed enriched, by the bounty that would surely flow from the economic stimulus of tax cuts. Three months after taking office, the new government handed back a $1.5 billion tax break, primarily to corporations and the wealthy. Despite warning signs of an international recession, the premier promised that the tax cuts would pay for themselves by stimulating the economy and creating jobs. Oops. Once again, ideological orthodoxy blots out the writing on the wall. Turns out B.C.'s economy is -- gasp -- subject more to the tender mercies of falling international commodity prices and slumping consumer demand than to the fond hopes of neoliberal politicians. All are in free fall. Seven months into the new government's mandate, the B.C. economy appears to have toppled over the brink of recession into a revenue black hole. The government has announced that it will cut a third of its work force over the next three years, and some departments will see their budgets reduced by half. Public auto insurance, B.C. Hydro, public transportation, and certain health-care services seem destined for privatization. And then there's education. Stuck with its campaign promise to maintain previous levels of spending on B.C.'s second-most expensive program area, the government declared that the education budget would be frozen for three years. Calculations that can be performed on the back of a pretty small envelope will show that the additional costs of three years' worth of accommodating increasing enrollments and inflation transform a budget freeze into a budget cut. The multiple impacts on schools of cuts approaching 10% have not been lost on the public. Even before teachers brandished B.C.'s top-of-the- heap PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) scores to a mildly surprised public, public opinion polls showed that British Columbians were typically satisfied with their teachers and their schools and had no desire to sacrifice public education in order to fund tax cuts. Nor were they willing to trust the government's version of life at school. Parents were six times more likely to regard classroom teachers than the minister of education himself as a very reliable source of accurate information about education.1 The government's timing couldn't have been worse. The provincial contract covering elementary and secondary school teachers had expired, and negotiations had begun on a new contract. …