A throng of at least 18,000 people turned out at the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton this afternoon to mark World Teachers Day by supporting members of the Alberta Teachers Association who are expected to walk off the job tomorrow morning in a province-wide strike.
If anything, that mainstream media estimate probably significantly low-balled the size of the crowd, which, even so, would probably make today’s rally the largest public protest in Alberta history.
Another 3,000 at least showed up in Calgary at the government’s McDougall Centre, according to local media in that city who are notorious for underestimating the size of any crowds that don’t have tickets to a hockey game, especially if they’re gathering in support of a progressive cause like public education.
In addition to the steps of the Legislature, the usual venue for such protests against government policy, the crowd in Edmonton packed the huge wading pool in front of the building, which has only recently been drained in advance of the fall freeze-up.
The throng turned out in spite of the constant efforts by Premier Danielle Smith and her United Conservative Party to blame the teachers’ union for the impasse in bargaining that has led teachers to the brink of their first strike since 2002 and the first province-wide strike in Alberta history.
Make no mistake about it, though, something’s in the air when those kinds of numbers turn up to support a rally like this one. In addition to union solidarity, this is evidence of real popular opposition to the UCP and its leader that extends far beyond the impasse in negotiations between the ATA and the province.
To that, though, ATA President Jason Schilling said in a statement today that “because this government has repeatedly failed to meet the needs of students, teachers and the public education system, we are taking a historic stand.”
“This strike did not have to happen,” he said. “The government had every opportunity to do the right thing. To listen. To act. Instead, they ignored the warnings from teachers, parents, students and communities alike.”
He said ATA members would honour World Teachers Day – which this year has been ignored by the government – “in the most powerful way we can: by standing up for ourselves, our students and the future of public education in Alberta. Tomorrow, we show this government what solidarity looks like. We remind them that we are not only teachers: we are advocates, protectors and builders of Alberta’s future.”
If they’re smart, Ms. Smith and the UCP will look hard for a way to break the impasse and reach a quick settlement with the ATA.
For, as the many pictures of the signs carried by the huge crowds on social media clearly show, the gatherings provided an opportunity for many Albertans infuriated by a whole range of Smith Government policies – from the premier’s encouragement of Alberta separatism, to the intentional chaos and reported corruption in health care, to the government’s slavish loyalty to the petroleum industry which repays the province with mass job cuts, to the party base’s obvious MAGA bent.
This also suggests the UCP may want to look closely at their widely suspected plan to call an early election, because the kind of generalized anger evident at the Edmonton and Calgary rallies hints at wider dissatisfaction with a while range of unpopular policies pushed by the UCP.
But don’t count on any of that happening. There’s a full moon today – indeed, not just a full moon, but a supermoon – so some real lunacy from the government is quite possible. Y’all might just want to fasten your seatbelts.
In the lead-up to the strike, as it began to look inevitable, the UCP seemed to be trying to take the lemons its policies were creating and make lemonade – by persuading parents to take home education grants or enroll their children in distance programs offered by independent schools.
However, as Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides noted deep in a government press release Friday, “if families choose to enrol their children in a home education program during the teacher strike, they would no longer be registered at their public, separate or francophone school. If they end the home education program, they are not guaranteed to return to the same school they attended prior to making the change to home education.”
Critics accused the government of trying to drum up business for private schools, several of them run by UCP insiders and strong supporters.
“If they are smart…..”, but they’re not. If they weren’t such idiots they would not be in this position.
Increasing private schools, sounds so free enterprise. The people of Alberta voted for them so now they will either learn to live with it or die because of it.
Everything the UCP does is meant to enrich themselves. They are deliberately destroying public education and healthcare so they can funnel taxpayer dollars into private clinics and schools and their own pockets. The forced treatment prisons are another scam designed to make a few cronies wealthy. Marlaina has nothing but contempt for teachers and is happy to demonize them at every opportunity, but many rational Albertans know that public education is vital to democracy and the economy.
Is is a “wide” or “whole” range of unpopular policies?
The government is also rolling out that old anti-union trope about “greedy union bosses” when they claim, in defiance of the evidence, that the ATA’s leadership is “out of touch” with their membership and “don’t know what they want”. Of course they know what their members want; their members just overwhelmingly rejected a tentative agreement that was little different from one they had rejected earlier in the year. I’m sure the only reason they put it to a vote at all was to avoid accusations of not being willing to put that proposal to their members.
Unions in Canada are, by and large, among the most democratic institutions in Canadian society. The ATA’s “union bosses” are its 51,000 members.
But over and over and over again, since the post-pandemic inflation spike of the past few years, in all sorts of sectors and industries, union members have been rejecting tentative agreements put forward by their leaders or bargaining committees — IMHO, largely in an effort to appear conciliatory and constructive to employers and governments, as well as the general public — and sending them back to the bargaining table to seek a better deal.
Sometimes that works without job action, as it did with United Nurses of Alberta earlier in the year. Sometimes that leads to a strike, or to prolongation of one already started. But the takeaway from this is that union members are now actually more militant than their leaders.
For the UCP, the rational way to end this impasse is obvious to everyone but them. But what does a child-free Queen Danielle care? She’s got grifts to do and bribes to collect. Screaming at her will accomplish nothing, except drive her than much deeper into her stash of cough syrup.
Fall in Alberta, regrettable, does not include the fall of the UCP.
That is a lot of people. It proves how bad the UCP are as a government. I have seen protests before at the Alberta Legislature grounds, but not at that level. The UCP are good at picking on nurses, teachers, the downtrodden, and others. Danielle Smith has a hero, and that’s Ralph Klein. We all know what he did to nurses and teachers in Alberta, and it certainly wasn’t good. It’s going on with the UCP too.
This may well be the beginning of the end for the UCP. 20,000 people is impressive. I don’t suspect working Albertans are blaming the ASTA for withdrawal of services. More like government mismanagement is the centre of blame. In any event, it seems like Danni in malice land. Buckle up for a really nasty fight with lots of lies from the government.
May I suggest that you help get the word out on the government’s funding preferences when it comes to education? Because they clearly favour privatization, like the one where Alberta has the lowest per-pupil funding of public education in the country.
In addition, apparently two thirds of the private schools they’re so enamoured of are “faith-based,” another giveaway of this government’s “agenda.” From the very beginning of Presto Manning’s Reform Party, the question of their agenda has come up, and after decades the closest we can get to revealing the avid evangelicalism (another link with MAGA and its blueprint for change, “Project 2025”) is to completely dilute and defang it by renaming it “social conservatism!”
Everyone seems to have forgotten the whole “lake of fire” incident from a few years ago that sunk the former Wild Rose Party, led at that time by Smith, and how that same religious bunch is folded in with the current UCP. It could rightly be called the United Christian Party, and along with the separation question should be the question of whether we want a theocracy or a democracy.
David Parker of “Take Back Alberta,” the guy advocating infiltration of “true believers” as school trustees, is home-schooled and has apparently read the bible TWELVE times.
Thanks to a consistently timid media giving the massive elephant that is religion a pass, despite that being a violation of our supposed secular tradition, not to mention the separation of church and state, using the back door has worked like a charm for these dangerous, nutbar UCP ideologues.
As revealed in a comment from the moderator at an Alberta Next Panel meeting when asked about the 89.5 percent vote to strike by teachers, “I know you’d love some chaos…” People paid attention to the last half of that sentence, not the first. Consider the present situation foreshadowed from on high.
Teachers won’t be picketing schools, school boards and government offices, though, so it won’t look like chaos. They will be holding rallies across the province where parents, students and other members of the public can show up and voice their support for teachers and public education.
What will Danielle Smith do about that? We’ll find out soon. Doubling down seems to be a favorite strategy for her, so I’d count on that. She might also take an unanticipated vacation to her condo in Panama for a spell or run off to Mar-a-Lago again or maybe visit her friends in Washington, D.C. for a few pointers on crowd management strategies. May I suggest a trip to Portland, Oregon for a some basic lessons on the culinary uses of pepper? ️
We get the combo special. Danielle Smith ran away and Nate Horner is doubling down.
In 24 hours, the deal that the premier said was close together has been declared far apart, “not even close”. What a difference a day makes. The finance minister threatened the “hammer” again (for the third time). It’s probably the “big hammer” Adriana LaGrange threatened when she was education minister. So many hammers, you’d think this is a construction site.
In the meantime, the finance minister will wait for the teachers to fix this, because why work with them when you can sit around and do nothing/work against them? The education minister seems to have nothing at all to do with his portfolio. Where is he? Who is he? Demetrios something?
https://www.ctvnews.ca/edmonton/alberta-primetime/article/finance-minister-says-government-will-consider-everything-if-teachers-strike-continues/
Paraphrasing from Reddit: what if protestors showed up every night until change happens?
Yes, this high turn out does seem to indicate that dissatisfaction with Smith and the UCP is now becoming stronger and broader than the main stream media realizes.
There is often a turning point in the mid second term of government when the honeymoon not only ends, but dissatisfaction suddenly starts to increase a lot. This could be that time. The UCP can no longer blame problems on their predecessors and there have been a series of controversial measures over the last year which seem mainly designed to appeal to their extreme right wing that are really not very popular.
So far the UCP has managed to hang on, but with oil prices languishing for most of the last year, it will also be hard for them to maintain the illusion of fiscal competence they created when oil prices went to near record highs before the last provincial election.
Thank you for the article!
I think that Smith has no desire to settle with the teachers. She wants to destroy public education and saddle the ATA with the blame. David Parker has called public education an ideological disease on social media, and has urged Smith to burn the ATA “terrorists” to the ground. How do you negotiate with that kind of thinking?
Smith is willing to dole out over one hundred million dollars (700,000 students x $30/day x 5 days)a week for hush money to the parents of the children affected by the strike. That tells you how concerned the UCP are that this may be a death knell for them.
How many teachers does it take to teach UCP basic decency and basic of governance?
The UCP are planning on punishing any parents who enrol their kids in a homeschooling program for the duration, by not allowing the children to return to the same school they were in when the strike started. That’s how much the UCP care about our children. Support the teachers, the children suffer. Don’t support the teachers and the children still suffer!
I read about it in the Edmonton Journal here….
https://edmontonjournal.com/news/alberta-students-home-schooled-during-strike-shut-out?fbclid=IwY2xjawNQwvBleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFNYXBYZUxjV0RRaGpUS2xZAR4kca7_QOPIFd8sCfJCZN_I8f2fBaMUGiKdmzk5K8vSVpHfWnQbyg14XypZoQ_aem_cTCkWGG2-nBHvmFjADzARg
And sorry I didn’t get to the bottom of the article before I wrote my comment David! I’m just so angry about this situation and can’t believe any Albertans still support this bunch of child hating, corrupt politicians that I had to make sure more people know about what they’re doing to our kids! I sure hope that folks are beginning to see how bad those people are.
Welp it caused the biggest Union support rally/protest prolly in the history of Alberta. Hey Dani, you’re doing this for WHO exactly?
Nobody should be surprised that Danielle Smith is responding like this to a union. We can hardly expect anything different from Smith, who worked as a scab during the Calgary Herald’s strike in 1999.
The moment I saw the MAGA comparison to the party, you lost my interest. Cry some more liberal tears.