CANADIAN CENTRE FOR POLICY ALTERNATIVES
Historic Alberta teachers' strike: What's at stake

On October 6, Alberta's 51,000 public, Catholic and francophone teachers walked off the job the first province-wide teachers' strike in Alberta's history. The province followed up with a lockout order, which limits the ability of the Alberta Teacher's Association (ATA) to implement rotating strikes or similar job actions.

The strike comes after months of bargaining, with 89.5 per cent of ATA members rejecting the province's offer of a 12 per cent increase over three years. After years of flat or minimal salary increases, the ATA says its members have received a total salary increase of less than six per cent over the last decade. Education workers want issues such as class size and complexity to be addressed in the new contract. 

So far, the province is unwilling to negotiate on these issues, but argues that it is investing in new school construction and 3,000 new teachers to ease system pressures. The ATA argues that, given years of underfunding and rapid population growth in many school divisions, this investment is insufficient. Talks between the Association and the Teachers' Employer Bargaining Association (TEBA), have broken off, but are set to resume after Thanksgiving weekend.

This labour action unfolds against a backdrop of increasing hostility toward teachers, school boards and public education generally by Danielle Smith's United Conservative Party (UCP) government, with the premier herself having argued in the past that public schools should be defunded. As Ian Doktor outlines at the Parkland Institute, the current government has taken several actions that teachers perceive to be detrimental to their interests, including forcing teachers to place their pensions under the management of the Alberta Investment Management Corporation; pushing through a curriculum on which teachers were sidelined; and removing oversight of teacher discipline from the ATA.

The provincial government has also acted to curtail the influence of school councils and school boards. In 2022, the province cut funding to the Alberta School Councils' Association (ASCA) by 75 per cent. ASCA is the body that represents the voice of school (parent) councils when advocating to the province. On the school board front, the UCP government commissioned an audit of the Calgary Board of Education in 2019, alleging financial mismanagement and even threatening to fire the board. The auditors found no mismanagement. More recently, the government passed Bill 51, which will place new school buildings under the ownership of the province, rather than school boards or municipalities. Last spring, the province also moved to strip school boards of the right to remove board members for code-of-conduct violations.

The provincial government has also introduced a raft of American-style culture war policies targeting LGBTQ+ students, including "pronoun policies" requiring parental consent or notification if students wish to be called by different names or pronouns; a ban on transgender athletes participating in girls' sports and a requirement that every female athlete's parents sign a form affirming she was assigned female at birth; and a change in policy around sex education that requires parents to opt their children in, rather than allowing them to opt out. 

Many of these policies appear to be the result of successful lobbying by socially conservative groups such as Take Back Alberta; Parents for Choice in Education, and the Alberta Parents' Union. All were apparently imposed without consulting teachers or school boards, despite the workload and logistical implications presented by some of these measures.

School trustees arguably have not pushed back in any meaningful way against policies that are criticized by the LGBTQ+ community and allies as an attack on vulnerable students, or communicated the gravity of funding and capacity issues to the public. In light of upcoming municipal and trustee elections, some incumbents have been called out for a lack of advocacy, even as socially conservative groups are training and supporting trustee candidates with the explicit intention of gaining greater influence over school boards.

All of these developments illustrate an education system plagued by high levels of mistrust, hostility and grievance, with students paying the price. When high school student Evan Li recently tried to raise the issue of education funding at a public forum with Premier Danielle Smith, the event's moderator cut Li's mic, accused him of asking an inappropriate question, and suggested he should be spanked.

Li's point, that the provincial government has increased funding to private schools while per-student funding for public education has not kept pace, is an important one. The Alberta Teachers' Association cites Statistics Canada data showing that Alberta spends the least of any province on public education. Meanwhile, funding for private and charter schools (which are publicly funded, but privately operated) has increased, with the province recently moving to be the first in Canada to finance the construction of private schools.

Alberta's government appears to be taking the opportunity during the strike to further advance privatization by offering parents a subsidy to enroll their children in distance learning programs offered by private schools, or to homeschool them under the supervision of a private school. Such a policy may be interpreted as softening up the public to accept American-style school vouchers, a policy that has proved financially and educationally ruinous in many U.S. states, but which the UCP adopted as a party policy resolution at their 2019 annual general meeting.

The public appears to be waking up to issues of public system underfunding and increasing privatization. High school teacher Alicia Taylor has received approval from Elections Alberta to collect signatures on a petition on the question of defunding private schools which, if it receives sufficient signatures in a 120-day period, would go to the Legislature to be voted on either as a policy proposal, or referred to a citizens' referendum.

The two sides in this labour dispute remain far apart, and it's unclear how things will end, with back-to-work legislation being a possibility when the Legislature resumes sitting on Oct. 27. However things end, it seems clear that many of the conflicts that have roiled education in the province in recent years will not disappear when teachers and kids return to class.