Freedom Flyer 12

Sir: In the March 23 Free Press an article titled Teachers give Cunningham straight A's indicated that I, the Freedom Party candidate in London North, had "flunked" the so-called 17-question test from the teachers' union by not answering any of the Federation of Ontario Secondary School Teachers questions put to me.

The impression left by the article is that I was somehow not interested in the issues, and somehow I didn't respond.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Great care was taken to give a response that reflected the Freedom Party's stand on education, with particular emphasis to raising the standards of education, and placing greater freedom of choice in the hands of parents of children attending schools.

But that is not what the 17 questions by the teachers' union addressed. None of the questions were about the high illiteracy rates in schools and how to solve them, or about the high dropout rate and how to solve it, or about how high unemployment for young people has resulted from this sad state of affairs.

All the questions were about whether we wanted to throw more of the taxpayers' hard earned dollars into teachers' salaries and how the parties were going to provide job security in the state-run, monopoly education system.

Freedom Party positions are certainly contradictory to the teachers' union, so it is no surprise I "flunked" their test, but that is because Freedom Party is truly interested in raising standards of education by bringing a healthy dose of competition and freedom of choice into the education field, and not by pandering to the self-serving, narrow interests of a teachers' union.

This "federation" is more interested in political manipulation of the system to give its members job security in a government monopoly, and the questions asked reflect this. Had the federation reprinted our answers in their "report card," the voters of London North would discover that the Freedom Party is concerned about raising standards of education, while the other parties are content to let the taxpayer be taxed to death to provide for a monopoly system that is a tragic failure.