Carole Gordon’s political journey from classroom teacher to President of the BC Teachers’ Federation began with the collective fight against the BC Liberals’ contract-stripping and an individual battle against Premier Christy Clark.
But her personal journey started in childhood. Growing up in Kelowna with her big brother and their mom, little Carole often played teacher. Her bedroom closet doubled as a classroom, her dolls were the students, and she wrote lessons on a little green chalkboard with the alphabet painted along the bottom.
Carole loved school and excelled because she was smart and conscientious. “I was a good student in the traditional sense,” she said. “I was good at math, I could memorize things really well, and I was one of the quiet ones.”
Carole developed strong attachments to some of her teachers and often hung out after school. Her favourite teacher was Mr. Saunders for high school geography and social studies. “He knew I wanted to be a teacher, so in Grade 12 one of my blocks was as a teacher assistant in his class.”
After completing her Bachelor of Education, she began as a teacher teaching on call in 1991 and then got her first position as a K–7 prep teacher at Peachland Elementary in 1993. She moved on to Westbank and Springvalley Elementary schools before spending her last 14 years teaching at Bankhead Elementary, the very same school where she went to Grade 1.
Coming from a small family, Carole found the support of an extended family within her school community. “The attraction was in the teaching and learning, but I also wanted to be part of that family of teachers. I consider the union to be family in the same way.”
Her career, and that of every other BC teacher, took a tremendous blow in May 2001, after Premier Gordon Campbell won a huge electoral majority, having campaigned on promises not to cut health care and education. Scant weeks later, he announced a 25% across-the-board tax cut, which necessitated deep cuts to public services and mass layoffs of government workers.
In January 2002, Education Minister Christy Clark tabled legislation that gutted all the hard-won contract provisions that protected teaching and learning conditions throughout BC.
Carole’s local, the Central Okanagan Teachers’ Association (COTA), called a meeting at the Elks’ Hall in Kelowna. The venue was so packed that she had to sit in the stairwell. Two highly respected local leaders described the devastating and inevitable impacts of the contract-stripping on classrooms, students, and teachers.
“I’ll never forget it. We left the hall and marched to the board office. My husband Ian, who is a CUPE member in the school district, joined us with our two-year-old son Eric on his shoulders,” Carole said. “It was such a strong call to action to defend our rights in the face of this injustice.”
The next spring, Carole attended her first BCTF Annual General Meeting, and she hasn’t missed one since. Four years later, she was elected second vice-president of COTA and began working in the local office with her second son Riley in tow.
Carole started a “Moms on Maternity” group to support new moms and to keep members on leave connected with the union. She learned that her local was one of only eight in BC that required teachers to return to work at a natural break in the school year, regardless of whether they had used up all their eligible weeks of maternity leave. “Members felt it was just so wrong; I had to do something about it,” she said. With help from BCTF staff, COTA made the district respect teachers’ access to their full maternity leaves.
Carole’s union advocacy for women carried over into the community, as she had begun serving on the board of the Kelowna Child Care Society and became United Way director. She was also elected president of the North Okanagan Labour Council.
In 2011, at the Canadian Labour Congress Convention in Vancouver, Carole heard federal New Democratic Party (NDP) Leader Jack Layton give such a rousing speech that she was inspired to consider electoral politics. “His speech was a strong call to action, saying if you want to make change, you have to be on the inside. And I remember thinking, ‘I can do this!’”
Soon after, Carole won the NDP nomination in Westside Kelowna—a long-time Liberal riding. In the provincial election of May 2013, she and her team gave it a valiant try, but they knew it was a long shot. To everyone’s surprise, David Eby defeated Christy Clark in Vancouver-Point Grey, and the Premier went looking for a safe place to win back a seat in the Legislature. She chose Westside Kelowna, thus thrusting Carole into a high-stakes by-election.
“I was out front of the school on afternoon supervision, and one of our parents came up and told me Christy Clark was coming to run in Kelowna. I thought, ‘What?’”
Soon after, she saw a message on her phone from BC NDP Leader Adrian Dix and she knew the race was on. She took a leave from school and plunged into a whirlwind month of campaigning. The first debate aired on CBC Radio, and about 400 voters showed up at the Westbank Community Centre.
“At one point, I was writing a couple of things down for an answer and I realized Christy was looking at my notes,” Carole said. “She caught the eye of my campaign manager and just smiled.”
As predicted, the Premier took the riding with 60% of the votes, but Carole had held her own, garnering almost the same number of votes as she had in the general election. “At the BCTF Summer Leadership Conference six weeks later, the president acknowledged my efforts and I got a standing ovation. It made me realize that even though I lost, my candidacy mattered to teachers.”
Then the question for Carole was: What next? “Going in, I had leadership and communications skills that the union provided me, but when you run for MLA twice, you gain additional skills fast. I knew I needed to give back to the union that gave me so much. And so, I ran for the Executive Committee and was elected.”
Over a decade later, with her family fully behind her, Carole is ready to take on the top job representing BC teachers. “I believe this work has to be done with empathy, curiosity, and humility because no one does this alone. I’ll be centring teachers and bringing everybody’s stories with me, walking the halls with 50,000 teachers—that’s really important to me.”
What has always guided her work is the famous quotation from J.S. Woodsworth: “What we desire for ourselves, we wish for all.”
“It’s really just that simple,” Carole says. “It’s why union work matters to everyone.”
Carole is President-elect of the BCTF until she takes office on July 1, 2025.