Contract agreements with teachers and education workers that the Ontario Liberal government were boasted were ``net zero'' actually come with an additional 300-million dollars cost to set up benefit trusts.
The five health, life and dental trusts will consolidate more than one-thousand current benefit plans.
The government believes it will eventually recover the set-up costs due to ``long-term efficiencies'' and ``improved purchasing power.''
The central deals with nine education unions are being made public today, months after revelations that the government promised in the contracts to spend 2.5-million dollars covering some unions' bargaining costs.
Of that money, one-million has now been issued to the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation after it provided details of its expenses to an independent auditor.
Those details, however, are still not being made public, beyond a summary of spending by category such as nearly 400-thousand dollars for accommodation and more than 270-thousand dollars on travel.