A Call to Repentance and Prayer

The Roman Catholic lectionary, today, points us to repentance, prayer and the driving out of unclean spirits. The NSTU is offering binding arbitration to NSCC to resolve contract issues before an announced strike date of Oct 27. These themes can be related. The impasse between College and NSTU is rooted in “dropping the ball”. After the contract had expired for almost a year, “serious” negotiation was undertaken. This came to a successful conclusion for the 10,000 P-12 teachers in the province. Shift some of the players at the table present the agreed details to the 900 College members and we are done. The precedent of previous negotiation is maintained and everyone continues to do their valuable work without non productive interruption. The ball dropped. To paraphrase St. Paul “All have sinned”. We now seek repentance. We don’t want to suspend normal operations. (any of us). Some damage has been done. If we manage to purge the “unclean spirit” of job action, we need to avoid a vacuum of no plan to “recover from the fumble”. Lack of repentance will result in the “The Return of the Unclean Spirit”. Let us pray that ego, pride, stubbornness do not prevent the acceptance of the “spirit of binding arbitration”