According to Danielle Smith, any additional pay for teachers means Alberta can’t afford for more teachers

SYDNEY, Australia – Let me take a few moments out of my Antipodean sojourn to make a couple of observations about Danielle Smith’s fairy tale about how the Government of Alberta lacks the funds to give the province’s teachers a meaningful raise and also hire enough additional teachers to serve the growing population of Wild Rose Country.

“We know that with the tight budget that we have, any additional dollars for salaries end up taking away from our ability to hire more teachers,” the premier said during the only opportunity reporters get nowadays to ask important questions – at unrelated news conferences on usually insignificant topics. 

Responding to a question about the Alberta Teachers Association’s statement that if there is no deal in its current round of negotiations by Oct. 6, teachers in public, Catholic and francophone schools across the province will walk off the job that day, Ms. Smith implied that the teachers can have more money in their pockets, or more new teachers to ease the amount of pressure in their crowded classrooms, but they can’t have both.

This is, obviously, baloney, as should be clear to anyone who pays attention to recent fiscal behaviour of the United Conservative Party Government and the kind of nonsense the premier and her cabinet peddle about it.

A free billion or more for TC Energy to build a pipeline that never got built, billions more in corporate tax giveaways, billions in investment blocked from Alberta to mimic Trumpian hatred of “windmills,” up to a billion for Turkish Tylenot that was dangerous for kids, broken masks and other medical misspending, and at least a billion to wreck Alberta’s public health care system and get revenge on Alberta Health Services for the pandemic. 

Not to mention the Big Brag, not very long ago, about how many extra billions had turned up in the provincial budget, which we were all supposed to believe was a result of the UCP’s great management. Plus, of course, the way UCP had no problem making sure MLAs would now get a pay bump every year.  

This is by no means an exhaustive list. But it’s exhaustive enough to illustrate that that billions are never hard for the UCP to find when it and its friends can benefit their expenditure. When dedicated public employees who actually provide a worthwhile service for society are trying to stay ahead of soaring inflation, though, forget about it.

And as the poorest little rich kid in Confederation, Alberta is always ready to plead poverty immediately after bragging about how rich it is, if that’s what it takes to do what it wants. 

Well, let’s pretend for a moment that Ms. Smith is speaking the truth (although she obviously isn’t) and think about what the teachers and their union should do in that case.

It seems obvious to me that the right course of action for the teachers is to get the biggest raise they can negotiate and say to hell with trying to solve the staffing problem the government has created. Nor should they feel any shame about it. 

Clearly, the ATA’s position on staffing and funding public education is correct. Education in Alberta is not only the lowest in Canada, we’re told, but the lowest in North America. Just think about what that means for a moment!

But it’s not the teacher union’s job, it’s said here, to fix that dangerously wrongheaded UCP policy. That’s up to voters. 

Indeed, the best thing the ATA can do to ensure that more teachers are hired in Alberta is to ensure that the jobs they fill are properly paid. After all, doctors and nurses aren’t the only professionals in short supply worldwide.

As for properly staffing schools – and not just with teachers but teaching aides, custodial staff, administration staff, and all the other people who are required to keep and effective public education system functioning – that’s the government’s job to figure out. 

The solutions are obvious enough, but the UCP don’t want to consider them because they are ideologically committed to the privatization of everything. But teachers can’t fix that mentality, and their union can’t fix it either.

Teachers should also prioritize contractual pay increases they require to stay ahead of inflation because the UCP can’t be trusted to keep any deal to hire more teachers. They are ideologically opposed to improving public education. They will look for ways to wiggle out of the promises they made.

Ms. Smith and her party are only prepared to keep the system on life support because most parents don’t want to be stampeded into sending their kids of private schools that are either overpriced, underperforming, or steeped in religious doctrine – not to mention in some cases all three. Nor do they want to teach them themselves.

Saying that this time negotiations must be about pay and you can sort out the staffing problem later will also make it clear quite quickly whether Ms. Smith actually thinks this is an either/or proposition. 

I doubt her statement is anything more than a strategy to get teachers to pay for what the government is going to have to do anyway.