The Alberta Teachers Strike: I am perplexed, confused, dumbfounded

My view, last year, was that the ATA [the teacher’s union] and the UCP [Conservative Alberta government] technical advisors all wanted the nastiest and longest possible strike to be followed by a poor settlement specifically and only because that would provide the maximum electoral benefit to the NDP [Canada’s leftist party].

Now that the strike is in progress the most obvious thing about it as that the public statements being made by the two sides are very different. In the past the ATA people have not been clear about their positions, but now seem to have settled on class size and complexity issues as justificatory, where the government has been very clear from the beginning that they think it’s about money but much less clear about either their offers or the basis for their arguments.

The straw that broke my resistance to thinking about this some more was Danielle Smith’s [Alberta Premier (think governor)] claim that because the ATA represents about 51,000 teachers in a province with about 850,000 students the actual average is about 17 students per teacher. That, unfortunately, is obvious nonsense – average class sizes are closer to 29 and even correcting the numbers to 35,192 active full time equivalents [FTEs] and 825,000 students only gets to a class size average of 23.5. Correcting for about 700 FTEs in rural schools with small classes in each grade, doesn’t push the estimate up past 25 either. So, bottom line, either the government is out-right lying, or about 6,750 qualified and fully paid teachers are missing in action.

The class size issue spills over into the government’s claim that it is building new facilities as fast as possible and hiring 3,000 new teachers plus another 1,500 educational assistants over the next three years, where the ATA simply says that this both not enough and too slow. Here they’re clearly both right: it’s not enough, they’re taking too long, and there isn’t much the government can do about getting the facilities built faster or recruiting more teachers – the teacher shortage is already so bad that provinces including B.C. and Saskatchewan are hiring the unqualified and uncertified to act as teachers.

The money issue is clear too: the ATA is claiming that the three year increase on offer is 12% where the government claims the average projected increase is 17%. Here, both statements are probably true: the ATA is merely citing the rate of increase for the most and least qualified [the top and bottom people on the salary grid] where the government is citing the increase applicable to the average new teacher with only a few years of experience.

At present it appears that both sides are ramping up the rhetoric with the ATA trying to foment a general strike while holding out hope for voluntary mediation and the government side is prepping back to work legislation. In my opinion this kind of escalation is a recipe for downstream NDP electoral success and a disaster for students, teachers, and parents --all of whom will lose, and lose badly, on this.

So what can be done?

1. The government can bring its grid mobility offer forward to bring the largest salary increases to January 2026 instead of January 2027, but limit its applicability to teachers spending at least 3.5 hours per school day in the classroom.

2. The ATA can agree to work with the government to dramatically reduce classroom complexity – reduce use of the social pass, reduce wokeness, deregulate parent/teacher/school interaction, reduce the role of consultants, and provide legal cover for the re-introduction of effective classroom discipline.

3. The ATA and the government can work together to provide new incentives for retired or part time teachers to put more time into classroom service.

4. The ATA, the government, and the school boards can work together to push ATCO type manufactured accommodations onto school grounds for temporary use while they work to predict the actual need for new stick-built facilities – existing projections are nonsense because many of the 100,000 or so school age children dumped into Alberta by the Trudeau government will be going home or otherwise moving on as wars get settled and both economic and culturally attractive opportunities open up elsewhere.