La chroniqueuse Margaret Wente du Globe and Mail

« Meantime, don’t shed too many tears for our beleaguered public-sector workers. They’ve done okay. The pay scale for Ontario’s teachers, who rank among the best paid in North America, maxes out at more than $92,000 a year. Police officers in Canada are often able to retire – with full pensions – around 50. In Ontario, where doctors’ salaries rose 70 per cent in the past decade, the average family physician now makes upward of $300,000 a year. The salaries of Canada’s university professors climbed by 46 per cent between 2001 and 2009; they’re now the best-paid professors in the world. »

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« But the biggest challenge faced by government is not restraining wages. It’s reinventing the way government works. (…) Government bureaucracies are rigid, hierarchical, costly, rule-bound and unresponsive. The rest of the world is increasingly flexible, mobile, responsive, results-oriented, accountable and flat. The delivery of public services must change. »

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« The real problem is not how much we pay the teachers, most of whom are capable, hard-working and dedicated. The real problem is the system, which is bloated, inefficient and full of deadwood. The schools are stuck with lousy teachers they can’t get rid of. Even teachers don’t believe these people should have jobs for life. But as long as their unions do, the teachers unions will become increasingly irrelevant. »

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« In the U.S., the urgency of reform has made ideology increasingly irrelevant. New York’s Andrew Cuomo, along with many other Democratic governors, is battling the public unions over pensions. And Democrats such as Rahm Emanuel, the combative mayor of Chicago, are taking on the teachers unions, firing the staff of low-performing schools and demanding performance evaluations. The old social compact between progressive politicians and public-sector unions has come to an end. »