Ninety-nine per cent of the delegates to the Alberta Teachers Association’s virtual annual representative assembly voted Sunday to affirm a motion of non-confidence in Education Minister Adriana LaGrange.
There’s no question that as education minister Ms. LaGrange has possessed a sort of reverse Midas touch – virtually every policy the former Catholic school trustee from Red Deer has come near has turned to something that’s definitely not gold.
But it’s worth keeping in mind with Alberta education policy – as well as other policy areas that have become highly controversial since the election of the United Conservative Party in 2019 – that it’s Premier Jason Kenney who is driving the school bus.
Ms. LaGrange started her part of the UCP’s policy rampage by forcing public school boards to remove the word public from their names. The message was pretty clear. She moved on to pandering to private schools while the government introduced a budget that amounted to a significant defunding of public education.
When the pandemic started, Ms. LaGrange was the public face of the largest single-day mass layoff in Canadian history, 26,000 education workers. For months throughout the pandemic, the government denied the danger of COVID-19 in schools and resisted prioritizing teachers for vaccinations.
Just to make sure teachers got the message about what this government thinks of them, the Finance Department hijacked their pensions for Mr. Kenney’s Alberta-pension vanity project, which the premier brought back from the crypt where premier Ralph Klein had tossed Stephen Harper’s quasi-separatist Firewall Manifesto in 2001.
Most recently there has been that ideologically motivated, incompetently written, plagiarism-riddled primary school curriculum that is turning the province’s once internationally respected education system into a global laughingstock.
Even so, the 98-per-cent vote of non-confidence Health Minister Tyler Shandro received in July 2020 from the members of the Alberta Medical Association, which bargains collectively for Alberta’s physicians, was a pretty tall order to surpass.
But surpass it the teachers did!
Given the size of the ATA, which acts as both the union and regulatory college for more than 40,000 public and Catholic schoolteachers, and the insults heaped on its membership by the government over the past two years, it seems likely the 99-per-cent non-confidence vote pretty accurately reflects the attitude of most Alberta teachers at this point.
It’s worth remembering that the ATA, while not supportive of every Conservative policy over the years, has had many links to past Conservative governments – enough to tempt some more traditional trade unionists to quip that ATA stood for “Alberta Tory Association.” The late Halvar Jonson served as ATA president and later as education minister.
But those days are gone. With his hostility to unions, enthusiasm for private religious education, and cranky, apparently self-taught views on school curriculum, Mr. Kenney has pretty well alienated every teacher in the province.
Since Ms. LaGrange, like Mr. Shandro, seems mainly to channel Mr. Kenney’s views, that hostility is rubbing off on her as well.
“Together we will persist,” ATA President Jason Schilling said in his remarks to the assembly on Saturday. “We will persist in our condemnation of a flawed curriculum. We will persist in our challenge to AIMCo’s right to manage our pension. We will be relentless in our advocacy for our students and for public education.
“We will come out of this — we will not be broken,” he vowed. “We need to reach way down into our last reserve of energy to make it to the end of this year. We will work together to reimagine a better future, for our association, for our kids and for ourselves.”
A normal government in normal times would be deeply concerned by the degree of dissatisfaction with the minister among the province’s teachers. Ms. LaGrange would likely have been shuffled somewhere she could do less harm by now.
But for Mr. Kenney and the UCP, it appears, such disapproval is a badge of honour, and a vote expressing teachers’ lack of confidence in her efforts seems bound to encourage more offensive policies unless the ATA knuckles under. This is unlikely under the ATA’s current leadership.
It remains to be seen if some other UCP minister can surpass Ms. LaGrange and Mr. Shandro and receive a 100-per-cent vote of non-confidence from a core impacted group. Environment Minister Jason Nixon might be a candidate for such treatment, or perhaps Advanced Education Minister Nicolaides. The challenge is out there.
NOTE: Credit where credit is due, several of the links in this post come from a tweet thread by former NDP finance minister Joe Ceci. It’s worth reading.
There has been a many years’ continuing critique of US charter schools. It’s a litany of utter failures, both in education and “schools” going out of business. No doubt current Alberta public school teachers could pick a few facts to bolster arguments against kenney’s brain failure on the issue. Nothing will change that ideological mind set in concrete numbness, but he needs to be put on the spot to explain himself to the public to stall for time until a change of government can occur. One which isn’t as nuts as the United Crazy Party wackjobs who come across as an array of Mad Hatters acting like bats in a belfry. Here’s the latest:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2021/05/charter-school-promoters-war-on-consciousness/
The interesting thing for me has been New York State’s continuing drift towards such “education”. Dunce Democrats are as neoliberal as the right, and besides, this way, racialized kids in particular can be herded daily into publicly-funded camps where nothing whatsoever is taught just to keep them off the streets. It epitomizes the continuing drift to privatizing a good crap in the morning, along with mere breaths of air. Why, it’s the American way! The “pay as you go just to exist or what’s the use of you” attitude.
Seriously, Bill, you’re not criticizing the concept of market-based breathing solutions, are you? DJC
Of course not! I’m a good little neoliberal, as you know. Ahem, neoliberal criticizer, more like.
I see that the state of Iowa is being pummelled into accepting charter schools. Alberta has a leader who already wants that wondrous type of turning over of taxpayer money to the grubby hands mob, because he’d like to teach a revised history of the world as he fondly imagines it, in what passes for his brain. Pretty easy to do if you grant charters to private schools only if they kowtow to kenney brilliance. So be vigilant. I’m sure teachers will be, as Alberta transitions into a cash cow for the already rich, run by a complete ideological nutter. Whether teachers can stem the rot is an open question thus far.
https://dissidentvoice.org/2021/05/school-privatizers-restructure-state-of-iowa-to-seize-public-funds/
The problem with all neoliberal get-rich-schemes these days is that privatizing sovereign infrastructure owned by people through their government, creates a high cost base that inhibits future investment. If everywhere you turn, some rentier has their hand stretched out for a tithe to use THEIR property, costs go up, so that even something as mundane as roads become a further tax toll on the average citizen and new businesses. And the blithe mistruth that the free market solves everything, endlessly repeated into uninformed skulls and accepted as truth by many, trumpeted out there by myriad “academic institutes” run by the elite, means the sheep are happy to be shorn, and even welcome being fleeced. How much better can it get for the already wealthy and incredibly greedy?
People, who cares about those nonentities, eh?
The UCP clearly has an agenda. It is to continue what Ralph Klein had in mind. That is to destroy public services in Alberta, and privatize as much as they can. If anyone paid attention to the UCP’s education agenda, it’s to devalue public education, while supporting other education systems at the taxpayers expense. Ralph Klein did that too. If anyone looked at the UCP’s draft kindergarten to grade 6 curriculum, it is so full of controversies, and confusion, that it incredible how the UCP can’t see what’s wrong with it. Adriana LaGrange’s credentials for Education Minister don’t seem to measure up to the task at hand. Hopefully, she will get tossed out in the next provincial election, as will the rest of the bumbling UCP lot.
Yet again, the UCP tactics are classic Republican. Scare people with “deficit” warnings, then cut taxes on businesses–making deficits worse, but “who cares when they’re ours?” Damage public services by slashing budgets, then moan about “government inefficiency” as an excuse for privatization. Spin everything like a top, and deflect any criticism back on the complainer by saying it’s your fault, you voted for the Other Guys. In short–make everything as bad as possible NOW, so you can blame the Other Guys Later.
MIKE J DANYSH: Much like Ralph Klein did.
Why should Alberta’s be subject to the monopolistic tyrannies of the AMA, ATA, AUPE and UNA? Competition always drives innovation and efficiency. The union dinosaurs can’t do math. Gas prices crashed in 2008 and can no longer buy labor peace.
DOUG: Had the Alberta PCs continued to get the oil royalty rates of Peter Lougheed, Alberta would have $575 billion more to use. Additionally, Albertans need $260 billion to rectify the messes the oil companies in Alberta gave us. Pretend Conservatives don’t help us.
You are assuming that AB could have earned those royalty rates. The industry started shifting away from conventional O&G deposits to higher cost oilsands and deep gas in the 80’s. The royalty rates had to move down in tune with the higher development costs and market risk. Fortunately, prodution volumes increased and the overall non-renewable royalty take increased substantially from the mid 90’s through to the 2008 shale induded crash in gas prices. Also, the Province markets rights to pursure O&G exploration through auction. If royalty rates increase, land sales decrease and vice versa. Because of this market mechanism, the government earns exactly what the market will bear.
I used to believe that AB should have saved more money, but its behavior post 2008 demonstrated why leaving the money in the hands of individuals and corporations was the better strategy. AB had built up its Sustainability Fund to something like $17B yet blew through it in only a few years instead of adjusting spending to new market realities. How can a government negotiate austerity when it is sitting on billions?
The unfunded reclamation amount is meaningless in this conversation unless one is juveline enough to frame discussions as the righteous public sector unions vs. the greedy oil companies,
Doug: nonsense: Norway’s rates are effectively 80% on oil that comes from the bottom of the North Sea. Now that is deep drilling with high market risk and transportation costs even compared to digging tar out of the boreal forest.
I would invite you to come to any farm or ranch with unfunded toxic oil field junk polluting the land, near by creeks, water wells, and cluttered with access roads and make your ignorant statement on unfunded clean ups. You might not be invited in for coffee, to say the least.
Yes, the Government of Alberta is entirely corrupt and failed to collect royalties and gave away any savings thanks to capture by the oil and gas companies. But it is never too late to start doing the right thing.
@Kang
You are wrong. Costs to bring product to market are lower in Norway due to market access and the higher grade of product.
I actually own farmland north of Edmonton (great grandparents homesteaded in Lamoureux) with reclaimed wells. Again, irrelevant to the discussion of public sector austerity.
I remember when I worked for the AB government when I was a student during the Klein days – great job as I got paid to study while my coworkers went for smoke breaks, filed fake grievances and pursued the latest scams to go on disability. The union rep handed out a list of talking points to discredit the Klein government. Sounds like unreclaimed wells and electricity de-reg have been added to that list.
DOUG: There was no sustainability fund. Ralph Klein lied to people. Ralph Klein was one who loved to dip into the Heritage Savings Trust Fund, whenever he felt like it. There was no excuses for Peter Lougheed’s oil royalty rates to be changed.
Yeah, because being treated like a Walmart employee has so much appeal.
Does Walmart treat employees as commodities and compensate them only based on years of education and years of seniority rather than actual performance?
DOUG: Competition always drives innovation and efficiency. Not in Alberta. Here’s a classic example of why that belief is rubbish. Ralph Klein, Steve West, and Murray Smith deregulated electricity in Alberta, and utilities. Steve West and Ralph Klein made the bogus and unsubstantiated claim that the costs of power would immediately go down for power consumers in Alberta. Well, guess what. They didn’t. Power prices shot upwards. Ralph Klein conceded that power prices in Alberta would never go down. Electricity deregulation and the associated things that went along with it cost Albertans $40 billion or even greater, by now. When Albertans were paying the lowest prices for power in North America, what was electricity deregulation supposed to achieve?
1) Power prices increased due to huge demand growth brought on at least partially by the Klein government’s success in attracting private sector investment. Since the economic downturn, pool prices (aka wholesale generation) prices have trended sharply downwards
2) Except for the citizens of Calgary, privitization of the electricity market protected Albertans from taking on billions in debt to build and maintain assets. Citizens of provinces such as BC, MB, ON and NL will eventually face massive rate increases and/or tax increases to pay for the tens of billions of debt incurred by their government owned electricity utilities. Calgarians are unfortunately saddled with ownership of Enmax. Former mayor Al Duerr had a deal to sell the utility but met opposition from counsellor (and future mayor) Dave Bronconnier and others, so it never happened. A young Naheed Nenshi made one of his first forays into public commentary by also opposing the sale. Duerr remainsunderappreciated as he lead Calgary through a period of downloading from the province with largely flat municipal taxes and declining debt, while skillfully managing the 2001 transit strike
3) Only AB and TX (and Australia and many European countries) have fully transparent electricity markets with fully transparent pool prices, transmission and distribution tolls and retail markups. Other jurisidictions obfuscate by combining generation with transmission, for example, burying costs elsewhere in government, or like ON, direct government susidies to end consumers
DOUG: Electricity deregulation didn’t make power prices in Alberta go down. Nor did deregulation of utilities in Alberta make utility prices in Alberta go down. That never happened. Deregulation of electricity has cost Albertans well beyond $40 billion. That’s not savings. Ralph Klein fed Albertans another bold faced lie. Before electricity deregulation and deregulation of utilities in Alberta happened, there wasn’t all these different costs on the bills. These costs are more pricey than the actual cost of the product itself. If an individual were to not consume any power for say, 3 months, because they went away from their home, they would still be paying hefty costs for a bunch of other expenses. Ralph Klein was getting advice from the wrong people.
Electricity deregulation in Alberta has ties to criminal activity, like the Enron scandal.
The Alberta PCs were tampering with something that they shouldn’t have been tampering with.
Hey Doug, or should I say Matt,
Easy answer: What do you call a government that has only 15% approval rating? By definition that’s a dictatorship. Even the unions in Alberta have higher approval ratings than this sociopathic dictator.
I don’t remember any union giving profitable oil companies $7.5 billion of our tax dollars. That’s called stealing.
Approval ratings don’t matter until election night.
Albertans may or may not vote for a new government in 2023. Unfortunately, they have no choice but to procure services from the public sector unions. Where is the true dictatorship?
I assume you are trying to distract with the dubious claim that the lower 8% corporate tax rate has given $7.5B to oil companies as the uninformed always turn to emotion. Even when the rate was 12%, the total corporate income tax take was only $4.1B: https://www.alberta.ca/revenue.aspx
Jason Kenney, via his minion Adriana LaGrange, has made a mistake this time. He attributes to others his own qualities and attitudes, so he assumes that teachers and doctors are in it purely for the money and social status. In Japan, teachers and doctors are called “sensei”, which recognizes and respects their roles as learned ones. Teaching and medicine are avocations more than vocations for many if not most in these fields of employment. In other words, they will not give up easily. If Kenney’s goal is to break them, he can look forward to a long and winding road. It does seem that his been his goal all along with most of what he does. He’s Wreck-it Ralph II.
The thing i find baffling is that, just like the Shandro vote, somehow there’s still 1% that actually have confidence in this utterly useless minister! Ah, good ol’ Alberduh….
This vote may be a feel good gesture for those of us in the UCP resistance to snicker at but at the end of the day it’s pretty much completely symbolic. Does anyone have a single doubt that Sleepy Eyes Adriana is anything but safe in her current role?
This surprises me. I would have thought that the number would be a solid 100 percent.
I simply do not understand it. Develop and introduce a new curriculum without any consultation with the Alberta teachers who will be asked to implement it.
Is it pure stupidity? Pure arrogance? Or a combination of both?
At the end of the day where would an Alberta parent with school age children place their trust with regard to their child’s education?
With their school teacher(s)? Or with the Education Minister in the Kenney Government?
Yes, that is quite the feat Ms. LaGrange has managed, receiving even less confidence than Mr. Shandro and that was a high threshold to beat.
What do LaGrange and Shandro have in common, other than their charming personalities? Well, as you noted, they are both carrying out the agenda of their boss Kenney. So, I suppose the non confidence extends to him also.
As the gambler song says, “you got to know when to fold them …”. Kenney is at that awkward age, a lifelong career in politics makes it hard for him to find another job and he is just a few years short of getting his pension. So, I think he is going to try hang in there, despite record levels of disapproval.
I do wonder if the message is getting through to him that he will need to make some changes to survive politically. He is a stubborn one, but if so, he might want to start with Shandro and LaGrange. It would be easier to start to change course with some new ministers.
Will wonders never cease? If the UCP can fall any lower, by now they’re down to fractions. First Tyler Shandro had a 98% thumbs-down rating from the Alberta Medical Association. Now the Alberta Teachers Association gives Adriana LaGrange a 99% “you’re no good” rating. It’s no longer possible to damage the UCP brand; only their most ignorant (or maybe well-paid) supporters remain.
It’s telling and totally expected that neither Shandro nor LaGrange have been kicked out. They’re doing exactly what Jason Kenney told them to do. They’ll keep doing it, until Kenny has been kicked out of office. With luck, Kenney will hang on to power till 2023, when we can fire the lot of them. If his own party turfs him out, there’s a possibility they can hang on under someone less stupidly partisan, though I can’t imagine who could pull off such a miracle.
I wonder…does Andrew Scheer still have dual citizenship in the US? Once we give Jason the boot, maybe he could get Andrew to adopt him. Then they can move to the US, separately or together, as long as they both go. They could spend their declining years writing their memoirs to tell the world that those mean ol’ Canadians never gave them a chance to prove how great they are, and it’s just not fair! (Cue violins, fade to black.)
I have non-confidence in the ATA. That is about as relevant as the ATA’s opinion on LaGrange.
The government needs to stop playing games and legislate across the board wage, benefit and pension cuts. If any union dare strikes, legislate them back. No amount of tax increase will ever balance the budget given Alberta’s outrageous overfunding of health and education. Interest rates and inflation are heading up, meaning that government austerity will struggle to keep pace with rising debt servicing costs.
DOUG BROWN: The UCP aren’t good money managers. $10 billion has been lost from corporate tax cuts. Absolutely no jobs came from this. $7.5 billion was lost on a pipeline that hit a dead end. $1.6 dollars was lost on an accounting blunder. $4 billion was gone from pension money. $2 billion of the Heritage Savings Trust Fund vanished. The UCP wasted money on other shenanigans. More cuts, like Ralph Klein did to healthcare and education are the stupidest thing to do. Had Ralph Klein not slashed the oil royalty rates that Peter Lougheed got, and didn’t make Albertans pay for his very costly shenanigans, including making Albertans have to pay $260 billion to cleanup oil industry related damages, billions lost from bad tax collection policies, and a multitude of other sizeable missteps, these cuts would not be needed. Adriana LaGrange should be sacked, as should the UCP. Leave the teachers and healthcare workers alone.
So why does AB need to spend so much more than do other provinces on health and education? They seem to survice well enough with sharply lower compensated healthcare workers and especially teachers.
I wouldn’t argue for pay or pension cuts but an increase in either invariably benefits those who earn high figure incomes more than it does lower income earners. I wonder if the solution could be to move to a flat dollar pay increase in an amount sufficient to cover the dollar cost of the lowest income earner of the increased cost of living. If that amounted to $1,000 in a year everyone would get an increase of $1000 and no more or less.
As the song says, “where do I begin?”. Inflation isn’t really up; the most recent annualized jump in the CPI is an outlier, an artifact of the fact prices took a deep dive a year ago when the first, sharpest pandemic shutdown happened. When the baseline for a measure goes down, any increase in that measure is greater. Most economists predict inflation to return to the 2% band in the next couple of quarters. In a continuing low-inflation environment, we can also expect interest rates to remain very low. https://www.focus-economics.com/country-indicator/canada/inflation
As to legislated wage & benefit cuts, how would stealing purchasing power from tens of thousands of public-sector workers — among them, nurses & other health care professionals, teachers & university faculty — benefit the economy? Don’t they buy houses & cars, food & clothing, hardware & building materials, and other products & services that create jobs? Many of those occupations are predominantly female, and in many household they have been propping up the economy while their oil & gas spouses — mostly male — have been un- or under-employed. Cutting their salaries & benefits would just transform a recession into a depression.
Why do we still think the only people in our economy who deserve higher incomes are fat-cat CEOs & other high-level corporate executives? As for legislating striking workers back to work, this is not only unconstitutional but could potentially be completely ineffective if the workers are pi$$ed off enough to maintain their solidarity. Remember 1988???
Alberta’s deficit is primarily a revenue issue: we insist on maintaining the lowest taxation regime in Canada, one which is even more generous to already rich corporations than the rest of Canada, and then expect the “heroes of the pandemic” to pay for it.
You should check out what shadow stats.com has to say about the real cost of living. It’s for the US but I am sure it is the same in Canada. Inflation is really closer to 10% than to 2% reported by governments.
It is a zero sum game. Overcompensating public sector workers transfers purchasing power from taxpayers, either current or future. The economic impact of austerity is irrelevant.
The AB is fully within its jurisdiction to legislate provincially regulated workplaces, like schools and hospitals.
Alberta’s deficit is primarily a spending issue: we insist on maintaining the highest spending regime in Canada, one which is even more generous to already well compensated provincal employees than the rest of Canada, and then expect the “society” to pay for it.
Doug Brown: it would be better to simply restore the royalties paid by Alberta’s oil and gas industry under Lougheed. As a percentage of the value of the product, Lougheed’s rate was 41%. Now we are down to just three-point six percent. If the oil and gas companies dare to go on a capital/production strike, just legislate the seizure of their assets without compensation. After all, Parliament and the Legislature are supreme and as you point out can tear up any existing agreements through legislation.
The Alberta oil and gas industry already owes us $260 billion in unfunded clean up costs for the toxic junk they have left all over the province. BTW the Norwegians take what amounts to an 80% royalty.
Here we go. Let’s hang all the blame on the unions in the race to the bottom. “Alberta’s outrageous overfunding of health and education” and unions et al are taking too big a piece of the pie. Never mind the multi billion dollar tax cuts for corporations that didn’t need or want them or the billion dollar give away to TC Energy. Myriad other ideological tax payer funded GRIFTS. Announce a multi million dollar job training program and have a 50 percent hike in university tuitions at the same time.
Remember the potato famine in Ireland at the middle of the 19th century. The Irish peasants were starving to death while the rich land owners were exporting beef and grain.Starving to death… how’s that for austerity?
Have you been to a grocery store lately? See the price of food,lumber,clothes. Not to mention rent. To be honest I don’t know how young families can make ends meet. And you want to cut their wages. Let them eat cake.
99% seems a bit low did they round down? Need more decimal places…