The teachers are getting a one per cent lump sum this year, and a 1.5 per cent increase next year.

Guess where some of that money is coming from?

Something called "secondary programming enhancement," which is a fund for students at risk of dropping out. It paid for extra staff to help those students, co-op work experience and courses that count toward college credits.

But now that fund is being raided so that our already well-paid teachers can have raises and lump-sum payouts.

Such a contemptible transaction should have been unthinkable for both union and government.

Meanwhile, there is more outrage at Queen's Park over the ease with which Sandals approved millions of dollars in extra payments to the unions without asking to see receipts.

The opposition has already asked the province's auditor general to step in and investigate.

People across the province are feeling the pain of the Ontario government's financial troubles. There are so many more important places for public money to go than padding the already soft digs of big unions.

Kitchener-Conestoga MPP Michael Harris was to hold a press conference Wednesday morning to highlight the case of, and present a petition supporting, Erika Crawford, who has a rare, debilitating disease.

The 20-year-old Brantford woman suffers from Ehlers-Danos Syndrome, a painful and potentially deadly disease in which her joints continually dislocate.

No doctors in the province have the expertise to treat her, so she went to the United States two years ago for life-saving surgery. It cost $60,000.

But the provincial government refused to pay. They claim that there were indeed doctors who knew how to do the surgery in Ontario, though no names have been provided and Crawford's specialists told her otherwise.

Crawford's parents mortgaged their home for her treatment.

Harris rails at the misplaced priorities of the Liberal government.

They won't pay for a medically necessary operation that's unavailable here, "and then they turn around and give a million dollars to a union with no receipts."

"It's unbelievable," he said.

So it is.

ldamato@therecord.com