The provincial government had just announced its plans to tie a portion of public funding for post-secondary institutions to specific measurable outcomes such as “graduate employment rate two years after graduation, graduate median income, employers’ assessment of graduate skills and competencies, and percentage of recent post-secondary graduates who report that the program they took was worth the cost.”

“Our new approach,” explained then-minister of advanced education Demetrios Nicolaides, “will help ensure students are set up for success by encouraging institutions to produce job-ready graduates. Students make a significant investment in their post-secondary education, and it is essential we do everything possible to give them a rewarding career at the end of their studies. By shifting the focus to performance, we will ensure taxpayer dollars are being used in the most responsible way possible.”

But performance-based metrics, says University of Regina professor of education Marc Spooner, threaten collegial governance and institutional autonomy, lead to further cutbacks in public funding, and undercut “the traditional mission of educating people, not just workers, and contributing to social and economic development.”

At MRU, for instance, the faculty, students, staff and administrators on various internal decision-making bodies have decided that every degree should include liberal education requirements meant to provide students “a well-rounded knowledge base in a variety of areas.” But under the UCP government’s new metrics, unless these classes provide workplace experiences or earn mention on student satisfaction surveys, they are likely ineligible for provincial funding.

Never mind that “the world of work is transforming rapidly,” as Spooner says in an analysis of performance-based funding for the Canadian Association of University Teachers, and that employers increasingly require the “ ‘soft’ skills like problem solving, communication, interpersonal skills and critical thinking… where universities excel.”

As well, outcomes such as graduate employment rates and incomes: are nearly impossible to track; assume economic output as the only benefit of higher education; penalize the arts and basic sciences, despite evidence of long-term earning potential (and other advantages); and ignore that “universities do not control the labour market, and governments are poor at predicting future labour market needs.”

Based on that and more, I asked my fellow board members at MRU to reject the government’s new metrics and, by extension, the further commercialization of Alberta’s post-secondary sector. They refused.

I asked my fellow board members at MRU to reject the government’s new performance metrics. They refused.

Since at least the Klein era, and government-promoted “market-friendly” policies such as tax cuts, austerity, user fees and privatization, universities have been forced to adopt “private-sector management practices,” “a customer orientation coupled with consumer choice and branding,” “outsourc[ed] labour with casual, temporary staff; and emphasi[s on] greater output performance measures and controls in the name of efficiency and accountability.”

This descent into neoliberal-inspired corporatization and privatization was exacerbated by a unique feature of Alberta’s post-secondary system: rather than enrolments or the actual costs of programs, provincial funding for higher education is largely based on the particular whims of governments.

Traditionally, institutions receive annual block grants from the province for operating expenses plus additional moneys for targeted capital (and other) projects. Funding fluctuates greatly from year to year, making long-term planning difficult. Still, allocations are made through collegial governance, largely without external interference.

But the UCP government has clear plans to upend and transform the sector.

There are, says Spooner, “competing philosophical visions for education. On one side … education should encourage democratic citizenship, support community engagement and social activism, and foment an appreciation for the intrinsic and emancipatory value of knowledge. On the other side there is … an increasingly instrumentalized university that primarily serves corporate and economic interests.”

For the UCP, post-secondary (like the rest of society) exists solely for the benefit of the market and must provide conditions conducive to the maximization of corporate profits. In government, says the 2022 Parkland Institute report Higher Education—Corporate or Public How the UCP is Restructuring Post-Secondary Education in Alberta, the UCP has “implemented a multi-pronged strategy to remake the province’s post-secondary education institutions according to [a] vision … less as providers of public goods … and more as ‘businesses’ that should produce commodities and attract private sector investment.”

“[G]overnment funds,” argued premier Jason Kenney in September 2022, “should align with labour market demands…. That’s why we’re trying to retool the education system.”

Attempting to align government with the market is not new in Alberta. But Kenney and the UCP aim to push that alignment further than ever. He saw students, his biographer Jeremy Appel points out, “as units of economic measurement, judged by their ability to get a job, consume, start a traditional family and not ask too many questions.”

And, following the April 2019 election, they put their plans in motion.

The first step in the UCP strategy was to defund the provincial treasury through the passage of the Job Creation Tax Cut, which lowered corporate tax rates from 12 per cent to 8 per cent over four years. According to researcher Ian Hussey, Alberta’s major oil companies alone saved around $4.3-billion between 2019 and 2022. At the same time, the number of jobs in the sector declined by nearly 3,500.

With provincial coffers shrinking, the August 2019 Report and Recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Alberta’s Finances (a.k.a. the MacKinnon report)—prohibited by Kenney from including revenues in its analysis—unsurprisingly recommended massive public spending cuts to balance the provincial budget. “[T]here can be no increases in government expenditures for four years,” it concluded, “and in fact the provincial government will actually need to reduce operating spending by at least $600-million and substantially reduce capital spending.”

Post-secondaries, specifically, needed to “be cut to a level comparable to… Ontario or BC….  [This] would mean a reduction of operating grants by 10 per cent to 18 per cent below their current level.”

Between 2019 and 2023, provincial “funding cuts to post-secondary education totalled more than half a billion dollars,” a sum that, reports journalist Cailynn Klingbeil, “represents a staggering 31 per cent cut to funding.”

The flagship University of Alberta was hit harder than most. “To put the magnitude of the operating cuts in proper perspective,” Spooner explains, the cuts to the U of A “represented a 34 per cent reduction in provincial funding— $222-million less—that had to be reconciled in 24 months.”

This drastic slashing, says U of A professor Laurie Adkin, resulted in the elimination of “800 non-academic positions through layoffs and retirements… and estimates [that] 1,200 full-time positions will be gone by the time the administrative restructuring has been completed. In addition, the contracts of hundreds of academic teaching staff have not been renewed. Retiring faculty are not, for the most part, being replaced.” The government expected that “this huge loss of revenue” would be made up “by generating money from ‘entrepreneurial and commercial ventures,’ cutting operating costs and raising tuition.”

“Only a decade ago,” Adkin says, “about 66 per cent of the U of A’s operating revenue came from its provincial grants.” By 2025 that figure was down to 39 per cent, according to the Blue Ribbon Panel. Tuition and related fees, on the other hand, rose from 23 per cent of revenues a decade ago to 31 per cent in 2025.

The Blue Ribbon report also concluded that higher education must align with provincial government priorities (i.e., improving economic conditions for oil and gas companies), and, according to Spooner, “it is difficult to see … its recommendations for using indicators that sharply narrow the meaning of ‘performance’ to labour-market, industry and economic outcomes as anything but an ideologically based attempt to redesign the fundamental mission of Alberta’s universities.”

This led to the 2020 introduction of performance-based metrics.

And my resignation from the MRU board that February.

“The Board,” I wrote in my resignation letter to minister Nicolaides, “was abandoning its responsibility to act in the best interests, including the fiduciary interests, of the institution…. I can no longer remain on a body”—one responsible “for the stewardship of the University” and “strengthening Mount Royal’s reputation by providing our students with exceptional learning experiences”—“that has chosen to support a funding model that will devastate the sector, and the students we educate, for generations.”

I should have seen it coming.

Back in August 2019, the government had stacked decision-making boards with sympathetic public members, under the rationale that this change would “strengthen… financial oversight and connections to industry.” All told, according to the Parkland Institute’s 2022 Higher Education report, “[a]t least 42 of the UCP public appointees… (nearly 28 per cent) have important links to the oil and gas sector. That number increases if we include appointees from the corporate services and construction firms that rely on the oil and gas sector for contracts, or the banks and investment firms that finance and/or own shares in oil and gas companies.”

“In many cases,” suggests MRU faculty member and Canadian Association of University Teachers vice-president, Marc Schroeder, “new board members hold high-level positions at corporations that benefit directly from the UCP’s deep cut to Alberta’s corporate tax rate, which, at 8 per cent [after the Job Creation Tax Cut], is now the lowest by far among Canadian provinces.” For example, MRU’s new board chair, Alex Pourbaix, was then president and CEO of Cenovus Energy, a Calgary-based oil and gas company that raked in $21-billion in revenues in 2019 and, thanks to the tax break, contributed hundreds of millions less to the provincial treasury.

Pourbaix and his newly appointed peers on the board proceeded to approve tuition increases year after year after year, further shifting the financial burden for education onto already struggling students. Since 2020, tuition in Alberta has risen 32 per cent, “far outpacing the overall rate of inflation and eclipsing the national average of about 17 per cent.”

“University presidents, vice-presidents and other senior administrators—along with the UCP-appointed public members of the boards of governors,” the Parkland’s Higher Education report says, “remained silent, acquiesced to or even endorsed the [government’s] restructuring rationale without publicly questioning its wisdom or necessity. It appears that the UCP has succeeded in bringing the boards and the executives into alignment with its agenda.”

The UCP government’s vision is a post-secondary sector that serves the market.

In correspondence with me, Pourbaix was also quite patronizing, requesting collegiality following my January letter. “Please don’t worry that I’m going to be hard on you for your views,” he wrote, demanding a call that he never got around to scheduling.

“Honestly,” I replied, “I’m not worried about you going hard on me. I’m not on the board to make friends or connections, but rather to fight in whatever ways I can for MRU. It may not fit with what you think is effective for boards, but I will use every tool in my toolbox to advocate for the institution.”

But that proved difficult. Based on my experience, Schroeder is correct in his suggestion that “a university governance structure … directly accountable to a UCP-appointed board means that senior management cannot be relied upon to mount any meaningful defence of their institutions despite being their nominal leaders.” This was clear in their easy acceptance of a performance-based funding model.

COVID-19 slowed initial plans, but in April 2021 the $3.7-million McKinsey Report—Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs—reiterated the government’s market-oriented vision of higher education. The purpose, the final document says, is “[t]o do everything we can to ensure that more of Alberta’s youth and workforce … are well positioned to succeed in rewarding careers today and tomorrow.” The sector, then, should focus on six main goals: “improve access and student experience; develop skills for jobs; support innovation and commercialization; strengthen internationalization; improve sustainability and affordability; and strengthen system governance.”

None of these goals relate to critical thinking, problem solving or citizenship, despite regular evidence from sources such as the Royal Bank of Canada’s report Humans Wanted: How Canadian youth can thrive in the age of disruption that employers actually want more problem solvers and critical thinkers, people who can express their thoughts clearly and effectively and who can adapt and adjust to the evolving circumstances of these rapidly changing times.

“Enshrined in the Ministry of Advanced Education’s ‘Vision 2030 agenda,’” the Parkland report explains, “the UCP worldview for post-secondary education privileges ‘industry’ needs and the commodification of teaching and research ahead of any benefit to the public interest.”

Adds Schroeder, “the overarching, single-minded goal will be the realignment of institutional priorities according to the interests of employers and industry.”

The latest step in this reorientation of higher education to serve the market was the Expert Panel on Post-Secondary Institution Funding and Alberta’s Competitiveness: Report and Recommendations, otherwise known as the “Mintz report” after its chair, University of Calgary economist Jack Mintz, that—finally!—recommended a formal funding model for the province.

Released in September 2025, the report acknowledged the status quo is in fact untenable, particularly given we “are looking at a 40 per cent increase in the size of the traditional post-secondary population” due to “the biggest youth population explosion in the past 50 years.” The authors suggest that since “the province has reached its fiscal goal… of bringing per capita spending on post-secondary education down to the average of the three largest provinces[,]… funding is [now] needed to keep pace with growing student enrolment and rising costs.”

They also recognize that post-secondary institutions “help build citizenship and provide cultural and learning opportunities for the broader public” and propose public moneys for base operating grants, IT infrastructure and targeted programs to attract the best researchers and projects.

Post-secondaries, the authors insist, “are better placed [than employers or employees] to educate and train students and respond to the changing needs of the economy… Faculty provide expertise to businesses, organizations and governments…. [I]nstitutions create demand for resources provided by the community and are a source of employment.”

All to the good. But as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.

The suggested funding model attaches funds to enrolments, a common enough approach, but it includes differential transfers based on “cost of programs, market demand and government priorities.” One could imagine that the arts—particularly the humanities and fine arts—would receive substantially less support than, say, business or engineering or, before the explosion of AI and the largely unanticipated shift in the labour market, coding.

Mintz, not unlike MacKinnon and McKinsey, also “focuses on outcomes, providing incentives and rewarding performance.” He suggests institutions receive a percentage of their grants if they meet government benchmarks in teaching, research and community engagement. The metrics suggested by Mintz include: employment outcomes and student and employer satisfaction surveys; commercialization, patents, licences and scholarly citations; and contributions to the workforce and local challenges, and financial support from companies and organizations.

Once again, none of these metrics consider critical thinking, problem solving or citizenship and engagement; they tie every outcome to industry and the labour market.

None of these metrics consider critical thinking, problem solving or citizenship.

The Mintz report also recommends raising tuition fees to cover the “increasing costs in institutions.” How much fees should rise, the authors suggest, should, like enrolment grants, depend on the area of study and, for the duration of a student’s program, be limited to 2 per cent per year to ensure some predictability. While this is perhaps preferable to the present uncertainty, where fees might jump 30 per cent over the course of a degree, governments can continue to assert their priorities by differentiating the cost of studies and can further devolve the financial responsibilities for higher education from the province (the collective) onto the “customer” (the individual).

It’s unclear how this strategy aligns with the goal laid out in the Alberta 2030 report to “ensure all Albertans have access to high-quality post-secondary opportunities.” Or how the  greater administrative requirements associated with performance-based funding—after all, we have to prove we meet the benchmarks—would allow the government, as the Mintz panel recommended, to “take steps to untie the hands of post-secondary institutions, reduce regulatory controls and unnecessary reporting requirements and focus more on the outcomes that institutions achieve for students and the workforce.” As the authors themselves ask, “If the province contributes less than half of institutions’ funding, how much control should it have over how revenues are spent?”

Based on this logic, shouldn’t students have a much greater voice in the budgeting process Corporations already do have such a voice through majority representation on the boards of governors.

As I told minister Nicolaides in 2020, in a statement that still applies after the 2025 Mintz report, “The model you have proposed will not provide the stable, secure and predictable funding required by institutions of higher learning to properly plan their offerings and services to best benefit our students and society; it will instead lead to constant uncertainty, reduced quality, more red tape and more pressure on our already struggling students.”

But the UCP government continues to care little about these outcomes. Its vision is a post-secondary sector that serves the market. That produces profitable research without pesky upfront investments. Or the annoying taxes that can instead enrich shareholders while individual “clients” pay the price. Run by institutional decision-making bodies stacked with ideological allies. “I consider advanced education,” said Myles McDougall, Nicolaides’s successor, in 2025, “to be an economic portfolio… an important pillar for economic development of our province.”

As a result of these provincial policies, higher education in Alberta is in trouble.

At MRU about half of our courses are taught by sessional instructors who, despite their advanced degrees (and massive student debts), get paid thousands of dollars less than we lucky full-timers to teach classes they must reapply for every four months. They receive no benefits. No pension. No job security.

My students are struggling to balance their education with family responsibilities and multiple part-time jobs that fail to keep pace with rising tuition and the cost of living. They stress about the grades they need to get into the “right” programs—nursing, education, engineering, medicine, law, business—and the money “wasted” on “irrelevant” general education requirements. In the post-secondary environment fostered by the UCP, these students are not being inspired to become critical thinkers and democratic citizens with “an appreciation for the intrinsic and emancipatory value of knowledge.” Instead, they are often taking degrees they hate, desperate for the job supposedly waiting at the end. Spoiler alert: it usually isn’t.

The funding model the Mintz panel recommends does nothing to address these problems. It only advances the UCP strategy to make higher education in the province into a sector that serves industry, not society (or even students).

If we accept, as Nicolaides said upon the establishment of the Expert Panel on Post-Secondary Institution Funding and Alberta’s Competitiveness, that “Alberta’s higher education institutions are critical to Alberta’s prosperity,” then we must demand autonomous, affordable, accessible, publicly funded education that benefits all Albertans.

Roberta Lexier is a professor at Mount Royal University, cross-appointed to the departments of general education and humanities.

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It was hard to imagine worse times would come for the UCP, but they did. That is, the book ban.

First came complaints from parents and religious leaders about inappropriate books in Alberta school libraries. Did the UCP know there were graphic novels in Alberta school libraries that contain visual depictions of sex between teenagers…? The consensus among UCPers: these books must be removed. Banning them seemed even better.

But first some boundaries had to be set, a bureaucratic framework for the action. The premier put her minister of education on the job, and he produced a doozy: a ministerial directive that spared no detail. “Explicit sexual content” was defined and minutely described: which body parts would be allowed to touch or enter which other body parts. The bit about “artificial sexual organs or substitutes” was an eye-opener. It was somewhat of a relief when the minister added “non-sexual acts” would be okay, as would “non-explicit sexual acts.”

Page two of the directive got into “non-explicit sexual content.” Again, no detail was spared. First of all, “non-sexual content means content that is not sexual in nature.” That’s pretty clear. The same catalogue of body parts is mentioned. But page two lists exceptions. Body parts and activities can be depicted if relating to medical conditions, examination and treatment and the understanding of human development. Another exception is religious scripture—I suppose meaning those kinky bits in the Old Testament.

Ayn Rand’s wooden prose and romantic scenes have a dual effect. They put your teenagers off both sex and reading.

But then the minister made a very important distinction. Sexual depiction is allowed if it “is for information and is not narrative.” There. He pinned it down. The dangerous smut occurs in fiction: novels and stories. Mind you, I’m not sure what we’ll do with smutty personal diaries, which, technically, are non-fiction. But I’ll move on.

To show that the Alberta government is not entirely against healthy romance between young people and their little gestures of fondness, it produced another list of those things young people can be shown doing in the name of affection: hand-holding, perhaps a chaste kiss. But for kids below Grade 10, even non-explicit sexual content is out. I guess there will have to be a ruling on books with hand games: pattycake, hand-stacking and thumb-wrestling—especially if these books are in narrative form.

At any rate, the school libraries of Alberta would have until October 1 to comply with the directive.

Things quickly went awry. A document appeared on social media: a list of books the Edmonton Public School Board said it would have to remove from its libraries to comply with the ministerial directive. It has 221 books by over 90 authors!

On the EPSB list were several titles by Canada’s Nobel literary laureate, Alice Munro. Another title was the Governor General’s Award-winning novel The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood—arguably the most read Canadian novel in history. Beloved Canadian First Nations authors made the list. So did George Orwell’s famous anti-fascist novel 1984. A surprise for me was to find US author Ayn Rand’s novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Rand’s mid-20th century novels are regarded highly by America’s political right for their stout defence of selfishness and greed. Danielle Smith was in fact annoyed by Atlas Shrugged’s proposed banning. She told a reporter that the book should be “mandatory reading in high school.” I personally read Shrugged in high school and, trust me, Rand’s wooden prose and romantic scenes have a dual effect. They will put your teenagers off both sex and reading.

When the EPSB list became public, our premier called the board’s action “vicious compliance.” I tried to think of another example of “vicious compliance” but couldn’t. I’ll fall back on a quote I remember from Canadian publishing legend Jack McClelland about book banning: “You set your sights on Larry Flynt [publisher of Hustler] and you hit Margaret Laurence every time.”

I think the dagger moment in all of this was when Atwood herself heard news she was banned in Alberta and posted online a little story she’d written to comply with the directive. Her tale is about a perfect Alberta couple that manages to have five perfect children without having sex.

The premier came back with a plaintive little line to the effect that all her government really wanted gone were the four graphic novels. Then I guess that’s what they should have said. Hindsight, eh?

Fred Stenson’s many books include the novels Who By Fire, The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.

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The students in my small program came from across the US—but also from India, the UK and the People’s Republic of China. (And in 1986 that was still a very rare thing.) There was even another Canadian—from Calgary. Stanford understood that recruiting foreign students made campus a more cosmopolitan and creative place. That, in turn, raised and maintained the university’s status both in America and around the world.

Today when I remember how thrilled I was to start my studies, I’m infuriated by the way America has politicized and weaponized the granting of student visas. For Trump it’s been a perfect three-for-one bargain. He has been able to indulge his xenophobia and prosecute his war on science and knowledge, all the while taunting and punishing universities that don’t bow down to his will and whims.

But while it’s easy to denounce Trump’s petty vindictiveness, Canadian politicians have also been playing political games with the issue of international students here. In January 2024 the Trudeau government announced plans to cut the number of international study permits by 35 per cent. The avowed reason was to reduce pressure on rental and housing prices, and to respond to the specific Ontario problem of cut-rate diploma mills that were luring foreign students with false promises. The plan apportioned student permits differently for each province, in some cases cutting the number of student visas allotted to that province by as much as 50 per cent.

Applications have plummeted. International students got the message they’re no longer welcome here.

There was certainly a problem, especially in metro Toronto, of small commercial colleges charging high fees for programs of dubious educational value. But to scapegoat foreign students for Toronto’s and Vancouver’s long-time high rents and housing prices was political pandering to populist prejudice.

Meanwhile, Alberta’s colleges and universities have spent years trying to recruit more foreign students. Those students pay higher tuition than Canadians, of course, which helps make up for cuts to provincial funding. And bringing in international scholars helps build an institution’s global reputation. Whether those students return to their homelands with new skills and credentials, or later apply to immigrate to Canada, the results are a win for Alberta and its standing on the world stage.

Almost 30,000 more foreign students registered at Alberta colleges, polytechnics and universities in 2023–2024 than did 10 years ago. SAIT in Calgary and Norquest College in Edmonton have seen the biggest increases. In 2013–2014 SAIT had 1,616 international students. Last year it had 7,743. A decade ago Norquest had just 153 international students. In 2023–2024 it had 5,383. The University of Alberta has the most international students in the province—more than 9,000 last year. But other schools, from University of Lethbridge to Keyano College, have also seen sharp rises in international enrollments.

The federal policy didn’t cap international enrollments in Alberta. We are still allowed to welcome more students. Nonetheless, many post-secondaries here have reported sharp drops in international applications—and school presidents have been quoted by the CBC as saying they believe applications plummeted because international students got the message they were no longer welcome in Canada. (Though I’m guessing homophobic and separatist rhetoric from Alberta’s government also hasn’t helped to win hearts and minds.)

Without international students and their tuition dollars, some Alberta campuses will cut staff and offer fewer courses.

I had hoped Mark Carney—an Edmonton boy who was once a foreign student at Harvard and Oxford—might change Canada’s unfriendly messaging. We could and should seize this moment to recruit top academic talent: undergrads and graduates who’ve either had their US student visas delayed or denied, or who’ve decided not to run the risks of being a foreign student in Trump’s America, subject to his mercurial mood swings. Instead, during his first prime ministerial press conference, Carney reiterated his vow to cap the total number of temporary workers and international students in Canada, to reduce their numbers from 7 per cent of the population to less than 5 per cent by the end of 2027.

What a wasted opportunity for Canada, for Alberta and for our post-secondary schools, especially our top universities. If we want to be prepared for the economic, social and security challenges ahead, we need to invest many more provincial and federal dollars in higher education, create more opportunities for Canadian students and open our doors to international students—not as an act of charity, but because they have so very much to offer us in return.

Paula Simons is an independent senator and the host of the podcast Alberta Unbound. She lives in Edmonton.

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There was “nothing to fear” in the New Eldorado of Alberta according to a 1910 federal ad campaign.

More than a century later, in August 2022, then-premier Jason Kenney launched a new ad campaign, “Alberta is Calling,” that once again peddled a vision of Alberta, this time seeking to lure workers from other provinces with the promise of low taxes, cheaper housing, higher wages and a mountain view. The first phase of the campaign targeted healthcare, trades and technology workers in Vancouver and Toronto with ads that ran online, on television and radio and on billboards and posters plastered at strategic locations—“Toronto’s busiest subway station is currently a giant ad for Alberta” said a headline in a Toronto lifestyle magazine in September 2022. A second phase of the campaign launched in March 2023, with ads across eastern Canada targeting workers in occupations facing labour shortages in Alberta, promising them a $1,200 “signing bonus” if they moved west. In March 2024 a third phase targeted skilled trades workers in BC, Ontario and Quebec, dangling the carrot of a one-time $5,000 tax rebate. All told, the ad campaign cost the Alberta government at least $10-million, plus the incentive money.

Since “Alberta is Calling” was launched, Alberta’s population has surged—by more than 204,000 between April 2023 and April 2024, a number that includes over 55,000 coming from other provinces (a Canadian record for interprovincial migration) and the rest of the influx from other countries. The province’s population boom—4.4 per cent growth in 2023 (above the national average of 3.2 per cent)—has been felt most in the cities. In 2023 Calgary’s metro-area population grew by 6 per cent, adding 96,000 people, while Edmonton’s grew by 63,000, a rise of 4.2 per cent. Alberta’s fastest-growing city, Airdrie, saw its population rise by 6.4 per cent in 2023, to 86,000, surpassing once-bigger cities such as Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie and Medicine Hat.

“The fact that so many people are coming to our province, I look at that as a positive, and we want to keep that going,” said premier Danielle Smith on the Shaun Newman Podcast in January 2024. “Let’s have an aggressive target to double our population,” from the nearly five million people of today to 10 million by 2050.

“Why?” Newman asked.

“Because then we’ll be the second-largest province,” said Smith. “We want to build this place out so that we can actually have the political clout we deserve, because right now we’re being treated as a junior partner by Ottawa.

“I think people are coming to this province because they know we do things differently here. We respect free enterprise. We respect individual liberty,” she said. “We have an obligation to be that bastion of freedom. And I think we should welcome the people who want to come here and enjoy it with us.”

The ambition recalls the famous line from the 1989 film Field of Dreams: “If you build it, [they] will come.” Except that in Alberta we’ve done the opposite—Alberta called, but didn’t first build out the field, so to speak. As a province we have not built the infrastructure or public services to absorb this many people this quickly. In the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts, advocates and policymakers noted the gaps and cracks that had been exposed and widening in Alberta’s public infrastructure and public services. Decades of government cuts, funding at levels insufficient to meet the pressures of inflation and population growth, deferred maintenance and a long-neglected infrastructure deficit led to cumulative impacts in which the structural pillars holding up public healthcare, public education, affordable housing, affordable utilities and public transit in Alberta were threatening to crumble. But instead of a sustained, long-term investment with a plan to fix these problems, we simply added to the load.

Alberta’s healthcare system has faced intense pressures that have resulted in widespread barriers to access for critical services. The reality for primary care is a painful one: the Alberta Medical Association (AMA) reported that in March 2023 up to 750,000 Albertans were lacking a regular primary care provider. While the Canadian Institute for Health Information puts the current figure at 15 per cent of Albertans aged 18 and over, the AMA projects that with the recent population influx the number of Albertans seeking a family doctor could soar up to 950,000.

Between 2020 and 2023 the number of family physicians accepting new patients plummeted 79 per cent province-wide, from 887 to just 190. The story is similar in every health zone: an 88 per cent decrease in the Edmonton zone, an 81 per cent decline in Calgary and a fall of 89 per cent in the South zone, where just seven physicians were accepting patients in a region with nearly 350,000 residents. The website Alberta Find a Doctor, which aims to connect those seeking care with a doctor, nurse practitioner or clinic taking patients, has posted to its search page a warning to Albertans that, due to the “limited availability of family doctors and nurse practitioners… it may not be possible to find someone accepting new patients close to your preferred location.” It directs the unsuccessful to call the AHS non-emergency line 811.

Even as hundreds of thousands of Albertans struggle to access primary care, the government celebrated a net increase in physician registrations: “More doctors registered in Alberta today than at any time in the province’s history,” boasted health minister Adriana LaGrange in October 2024. “We know Alberta is an attractive place to work as a physician.” The figures from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta show 518 additional registrations over the previous 12 months—but that increase barely accounts for the population growth in the same period. Even if all of those physicians were practising in comprehensive primary care (and evidence from CPSA, AMA and CIHI indicates they are not; overall trends show new doctors choosing specialties other than primary care), Alberta still faces what AMA past-president Paul Parks terms a “deficit position” due to “having lost 2,471 physicians” in an “exodus” from the province since 2019. In a survey of its members in September 2024, the AMA found that 58 per cent of physicians in rural, family and acute care in Alberta are considering leaving the province or medical practice altogether; 65 per cent of those physicians have acted on their discontent and begun making plans to get out by 2029.

Among nurses, a September 2024 study found approximately 48 per cent of them in Alberta are leaving the profession by age 35, putting Alberta among the bottom four provinces for losing young nurses. The ratio of nurses leaving the profession to those entering it has worsened by nearly 40 per cent since 2013. Polling by the Canadian Federation of Nursing Unions supports that figure: approximately 40 per cent of nurses across all age groups intend to leave the profession within one year, citing insufficient remuneration, overwork and understaffing, stressful work environments and a lack of work–life balance.

Glowing promises from Alberta in the Toronto subway.

In Alberta the UCP government’s campaign to dismantle and restructure Alberta Health Services (AHS) and divide healthcare provision among four new agencies has left nurses feeling their concerns are being ignored. The reshuffle is imposing new workload burdens and additional costs without improving working conditions or healthcare delivery. Instead of a comprehensive and evidence-based health workforce plan for recruitment and retention, the UCP government has relied on sporadic announcements of limited funds to incentivize more people into nursing, while increasing funding for private nursing agencies to provide temporary coverage. Over seven years of available data, Alberta’s spending on for-profit nursing agencies exploded by some 13 times, from under $400,000 in 2015–16, to more than $5-million in 2021–22. As nurses in Alberta enter another contentious round of collective bargaining, political commentator David Climenhaga notes that “we now have a system in which employers plead poverty to keep staff nursing wages low while they are forced to pay far more to nursing agencies for staff they can no longer operate without.”

Meanwhile, Alberta hospitals are aging past their useful lifespan, and bed space numbers still haven’t recovered from the Ralph-Klein-era cuts in the 1990s. The long-promised and -delayed South Edmonton hospital was shelved after the UCP government halted funding for it in the 2024 budget. Despite doubling in population, Edmonton has had no new hospital since 1988. Without the South Edmonton hospital, the Edmonton zone alone will be short nearly 1,500 beds by 2026 (when the new facility would have opened). It would require the equivalent of a new hospital in each of Edmonton and Calgary to meet the healthcare needs of the more than 200,000 new Albertans that moved here last year.

Public education in Alberta is under similar strain. After consecutive years of record-setting enrolment growth, schools in the Calgary Board of Education district hit 93 per cent use of space in 2023–24, leaving little room for the projected 8,000 new students. Only two high schools in the city were anticipated to be able to accept new students in 2024–25, as total enrolment had reached 103 per cent capacity. CBE is estimated to need over 40,000 new student spaces over the next 10 years.

The challenge for Edmonton public schools is equally daunting: to meet projected enrolment growth and catch up on the existing shortfall, the district would need 50 new schools by 2033. To cope in the short term, the district implemented a growth control model in 2020 that utilizes a lottery system for oversubscribed schools.

Overcapacity leads to unwieldy class sizes and increased class complexity, along with limitations on programming as music rooms and libraries are converted into makeshift classrooms and access for students with special or additional needs is constricted. Parents of these students increasingly feel pushed out the door towards charter schools that can promise lower student–teacher ratios and more resources (though charter schools are not obligated to accept all students).

In the public system 1,500 educational assistant roles are unfilled due to a lack of provincial funding. EAs are meant to help mitigate the class size and complexity challenges. Yet, when 3,200 EAs and other support workers walked off the job in a one-day protest in October 2024, parents of special-needs students were told that for “safety” reasons their children “should stay home.” The system—in which the province directs school districts’ budgets and bargaining offers—cannot function without these EA staff, but doesn’t pay them a living wage or offer adequate working conditions.

While the 2024–25 provincial budget claimed record-high investment in K–12 education, the funding increase to public schools was only 4 per cent. The Alberta Teachers’ Association estimates that per-student funding—already the lowest in Canada—would need to increase by 13 per cent just to hit the national average.

Contrast this with the unprecedented funding in 2024 to private for-profit and charter schools for infrastructure and transportation. Charter school student spaces are now set to double—to 12,500—and, according to premier Smith, government funding will enable “thousands” of new spaces for students in “independent” private schools. That’s on top of Alberta’s uniquely high allocation of per-student funding to private schools at 70 per cent of the public rate. As the public system remains underfunded, Albertans are seeing a strategic shift of resources from the public system to the private education market.

Post-secondary institutions have been similarly starved of public money. The province has cut its share of funding to colleges and universities while capping tuition increases for domestic students. As a result, public post-secondary institutions have seen per-student funding drop to historic lows. Their response, amid limited permitted revenue streams, has been to rely heavily on increasing enrolment of international students and greatly increased fees. But now, when the number of international students is being capped across the country, students considering studying in Canada may be reconsidering that option due to limited student housing, reduced access to healthcare and fewer pathways to legitimate work. This in turn has deepened the financial crunch for public post-secondaries, leading to even more deferred maintenance, deeper cuts to support staff and a greater reliance on contracted teaching staff.

New Albertans must have somewhere to live. While housing starts appear to have made up for some of the ground lost during the COVID-19 pandemic, the roughly 40,000 units that began construction in 2024 didn’t fully cover an additional 204,000 Albertans—even if one were to generously distribute five people per home. Affordable, government-subsidized housing faces an even worse shortfall: while 1,235 new units were funded in 2024, only 250 of those were completed between December 2023 and October 2024. Meanwhile, in Edmonton alone, the number of residents without stable housing hit 5,000 in 2024, up 2,000 in a year and having nearly tripled since 2020. This affordable housing deficit has led to expensive downstream impacts—approximately $1-billion annually, including more public money going to increased policing and security, medical care and mental health and addictions support. The only long-term solution to homelessness is housing—surely that is obvious. What is less clear is who should build those houses and how. To what extent should basic necessities such as shelter be left to market forces Should governments be obligated to ensure sufficient housing is built to meet the needs of the population they have deliberately sought to expand?

Not only housing is lacking at the local level. A 2024 report by the Rural Municipalities of Alberta calculated Alberta’s overall rural municipal infrastructure deficit at $17.25-billion. That includes deferred maintenance or replacement of roadways, bridges and water utilities that are vital to communities’ survival. Based on current provincial funding, that deficit will grow to $40.7-billion in 2028—more than doubling in three years. This state of affairs is a direct consequence of years of underfunding below inflation and population increases. In 2011–12, the provincial government budgeted $420 per capita for rural municipal infrastructure; by 2022–23 that figure had dropped to $150 per capita. Taking into account recent increases allocated in the 2024–25 provincial budget only sees a fraction of that lost ground regained—to $186 per person. A one-time grant program announced by the province in October 2024 to help small- and medium-sized communities address population pressures on infrastructure accounts for a mere 0.15 per cent of the total infrastructure shortfall.

Those wondering about the consequences of a few more years of infrastructure neglect might think back to Calgary’s dry, dirty summer of 2024, when council imposed city-wide water restrictions on residents and businesses after a crucial water main failed. As Alberta’s urban municipalities grow, so does the urgency for building public transit, emergency services, recreation facilities and services over and above keeping the lights on and the taps running. The economic reality for many municipalities, however, is challenging. The City of Edmonton, for instance, now receives less funding from the province than it did in 2009, before adjusting for inflation, even as the population of the city has grown by nearly 50 per cent.

The $10-million ad campaign worked. Alberta’s population surged by more than 204,000 between April 2023 and April 2024

Amid steady growth punctuated by spikes of immigration in recent decades, Alberta did not build the public infrastructure and services necessary to fully support that growth. This was a deliberate and explicit policy choice—enshrined again now in finance minister Nate Horner’s mandate letter from premier Smith—to hold provincial spending at less than inflation plus population growth. Collectively, as a province, we are now living with the repercussions—the day-to-day impacts of rapid growth without a sustainable plan. Instead of a plan, we have initiatives such as the “Alberta is Calling” campaign to bring in new workers.

The argument for bringing in workers has some value—of course we need construction workers to build new schools, hospitals and continuing care facilities, and teachers, nurses and support workers to staff them. Of course we need skilled tradespeople to support diversifying our economy, to develop renewable energy resources, to clean up abandoned wells—not merely to squeeze every drop of bitumen from the oil sands. But this is not, by and large, the objective of the “Alberta is Calling” campaign, nor of this government in general, which appears to favour piecemeal recruitment and retention, wage suppression and interference in collective bargaining and continued political antagonism toward public-sector workers.

For premier Smith, as she said on the Shaun Newman Podcast in January 2024, the point of quickly growing Alberta’s population is to increase the province’s political clout within Canada and to confirm Alberta as a “bastion of freedom.” But not everyone loved that pitch. In August 2024 a video clip of her appearance on the podcast was posted to X (formerly Twitter), where her call for an “aggressive target to double our population” drew scathing criticism from conservatives both online and at UCP-members-only town halls, where Smith spoke ahead of a party leadership review vote in November.

On September 12 Smith reframed her message on population growth, appearing to pivot hard with a press release that blamed “the Trudeau government’s unrestrained border policies” for infrastructure challenges in Alberta. Focusing on a federal proposal to relocate asylum seekers to Canada throughout several provinces, Smith declared “excessive levels of immigration to this province are increasing the cost of living and strain[ing] public services for everyone. We are informing the government of Canada that, until further notice, Alberta is not open to having these additional asylum seekers settled in our province. We simply cannot afford it.” [Italics mine.] In her statement, Smith emphasized that the province “has always welcomed newcomers who possess our shared values—and we will continue to do so.” As CTV News reported, “when pressed on what those ‘shared values’ are, a representative told CTV News ‘freedom, family, faith, community and free enterprise’ are important.”

The language recalled the ad campaign in the early 20th century that pitched Alberta as a homeland for self-made “pioneers” seeking freedom of opportunity. That promotion sold a version of the Canadian West that didn’t really exist, but in the selling it conjured a self-identity for the nascent Alberta. While not aligning with the reality lived by many Albertans over the last century, it created a mythology that politicians such as Smith can lean on to evoke an imagined past and the notion of an ideal Albertan. But the question is for whom and to what end?

An answer emerged on September 17, when premier Smith spoke to Albertans in a video address that began with a reference to “shared values” before announcing new funding for schools. The subsequent press release summed up the message: “The population growth has not only increased pressure in the public and separate school system but has increased demand for publicly funded charter programming and space needs.” Charter schools—a slippery slope to privatized education—would get infrastructure funding, and, in a policy unique in Canada, the UCP government will spend public money to build the bricks-and-mortar infrastructure for private schools.

In other words, the UCP government’s solution to the problem of how to bridge the gap between the growing population and Alberta’s lagging public infrastructure capacity is to privatize that infrastructure and our public services as much as possible.

In fall 2024, like clockwork, the UCP government pulled the oil price card from its trusty deck of diversions, hinting about a possible deficit in the 2025–26 budget and paving the way for lowballing public-sector wages and cutting public services. At a crucial time in our province, when massive investment in and restoration of the social safety net is needed, the spectre of cuts, flight of professionals and another round of privatization and public infrastructure firesales looms once more. While newcomers to Alberta may be unfamiliar with this playbook, for some of us this recalls an Alberta we recognize all too well.

The spiral of chaos and dysfunction is a result not of incompetence but of deliberate strategy. When the systems we rely on are broken, and the purported “solutions” on offer merely cause more damage, the most vulnerable Albertans—the very young, the elderly, the poor, the disabled or those with complex needs—will bear the costs. Is this the Alberta we want to build?

Rebecca Graff-McRae is the research manager for the Parkland Institute at the University of Alberta.

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Read more: “Four Newcomers” who answered Alberta’s call.

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As we sat there weary and greasy-fingered, Amedeo thanked me over and over for bringing him to Mexico. “We’ve only been here an hour,” I said. “We’ll see if you’re still thankful after a few days.” I was joking. My heart swelled. I felt like a good dad.

I wrote about becoming a father In these pages shortly after Amedeo was born, when I enumerated the things I vowed to do with my new son. I’ve made decent progress on the list over the last 14 years. We’ve tossed pebbles into rivers, as promised, and I’ve carried Amedeo on my shoulders. I haven’t shown him how to tie a necktie or open a bottle of wine yet, but a few months ago I bought him his first safety razor and taught him how to shave. In that essay I also wrote: “Together we will send postcards home from Africa, where we will travel to see the Sahara.”

We haven’t gone to Africa. Besides a brief trip to Halifax, Amedeo and I had never travelled alone, just the two of us, anywhere. By the summer of 2023, when Amedeo was 13, I felt we were long overdue for our first overseas father–son journey. The promised Sahara trip seemed a bit ambitious for a 10-day summer jaunt, and nobody writes postcards anymore anyway, but I wanted us to go somewhere more adventurous than a beach resort or corporate amusement park.

Amedeo thanked me over and over for bringing him to Mexico. “We’ve only been here an hour,” I said.

The previous few years hadn’t been easy on Amedeo. His mother and I split in the spring of 2020. Then his grandmother, whom he adored, passed away. The pandemic intensified all the regular adolescent anxieties emerging from Amedeo’s graduation from elementary school to junior high, and from child to teen. Our relationship had evolved into something completely new, because so had we. All of a sudden he held opinions on politics and human rights. All of a sudden he was taller than me. And I was a single dad, all of a sudden. I’d turned 50 that spring and that mattered too. Our first trip together would be the happy milestone that lightened my middle-aged millstone.

Because everything about our bond felt new, it felt important to me that we travel to someplace we’d never been. Somewhere new to both of us. We would be equals in this way. I vowed to be a responsible dad and an affable companion, but I didn’t want to be a guide. I wanted to stay out of the way of Amedeo’s experience, and not block his sight- and heart-lines.

So we chose Mexico City. We planned on visiting the Pyramids of Teotihuacán, floating on the ancient Xochimilco canals, and watching some lucha libre. Compromises were made. Amedeo nearly died of boredom when I suggested we visit the Frida Kahlo museum, for example. Fair enough. I didn’t care much about what we did or didn’t do. I just wanted to spend time with my growing son in the place where I am most happy: in a foreign country among strangers.

I embarked on my first substantial trip after university when I signed on with an overseas volunteer organization. I spent three months teaching biology to high school students in Ghana. When my placement ended, I strapped on a blue backpack and wandered through eight West African countries for the next nine months.

I turned 25 on that trip, but I was always among the oldest travellers in the hostels I stayed in. My fellow backpackers were mostly gap-year kids in their late teens or freshly minted undergrads in their early twenties. I envied them. They already had a deep sense of the world I lacked. I regretted not having started my own wanderings earlier.

Should we go to the family-oriented wrestling show or the espectacular “No brainer. I want spectacular.”

As if to make up for lost time, I engaged with everything I could during my time in Africa. I filled my journals with a year’s worth of experiences I still think and talk about. I was cut in a knife robbery in Togo, and witnessed strange religious rituals in Benin. I helped a paleontology team unearth dinosaur fossils in the desert—hence my Saharan fixation. I read dozens of books in dozens of cheap hotel rooms and sent rambling handwritten letters home. My first pen strokes as a writer. I survived a near-fatal bout of malaria, too. Had I not fallen ill surrounded by Peace Corps volunteers with a cabinet full of emergency meds I might not have returned. I still can’t donate blood.

My malaria-scarred bloodstream wasn’t the only affliction I brought home from Africa. I returned to Canada with a case of persistent wanderlust. Meeting locals and like-minded travellers in dilapidated buses and filthy hostel dorms made me profoundly happy. I loved getting lost and unlost, and travelling with neither itinerary nor purpose. I’ve had the great privilege to travel widely in the years since, and this feeling has never waned. I love engaging, even briefly, with people whose lives don’t resemble mine. Travel should not be a self-aggrandizing activity but the opposite: a humbling exercise of empathy. Those faraway interactions still fulfill me. To borrow a Neko Case lyric, I’ve learned the most tender place in my heart is for strangers.

I wasn’t so naïve as to think I could impart all of this to Amedeo during our 10 Mexican days. I knew I couldn’t simply hand down my wanderlust the same way I did my high school wrestling jacket—which Amedeo promptly outgrew. But I wanted to see how our journey would stir his own tender heart.

I quickly learned Amedeo shares my general disinterest in sightseeing and souvenir shopping. He bought some small gifts for his mother but nothing for himself. I was tempted to buy him the set of knock-off Harry Potter Lego called “Justice Magician” we found at the vast Sunday flea market. Amedeo had little interest in taking photos—we had this in common too—so I had to shoulder the responsibility of documenting our trip. Each time I passed him my phone to take a photo of me, he snapped several duck-faced selfies of himself first, then laughed when I discovered the gag. I deleted most of them. The ones I saved will be my souvenirs.

Amedeo also shares my appreciation for the absurd. During our afternoon at Teotihuacán, we watched in rapture as a man laid a purple yoga mat in front of the Pyramid of the Moon, sat down cross-legged, and attached a copper antenna to the top of his head. Amedeo grows weary of my dad jokes, but laughed out loud when I suggested he ask the spaceman for his wifi password.

My attempts to speak Spanish to restaurant and hotel staff annoyed Amedeo at first. He couldn’t understand why I’d try to communicate in a language I don’t know when the locals I was talking to likely spoke English. After a few days, he was doing the same. I’ve seen grown-up travellers flounder when confronted with a language they cannot speak, as if the foreign words immobilize them. The language barrier didn’t faze Amedeo, though. Any time someone addressed him in Spanish, he responded with a few hand gestures and the polite crumbs of Spanish we’d gathered. My heart swelled again.

Still, sometimes Amedeo seemed more interested in telling me about the shenanigans of his beloved cat back home than all that was going on around us. I thought of a conversation I’d seen between Anthony Bourdain and Iggy Pop. After answering several probing questions, Pop remarked on Bourdain’s curiosity. Bourdain replied, “It is my only virtue.” I wondered if curiosity could be taught. Maybe the best that parents can do is to expose our children to the new and unfamiliar and hope they care enough to notice. Or, better yet, leave well enough alone and let our duck-face-making teenagers grow into the people they are going to be.

Amedeo is nearly a man. He’s not my shadow.

I enjoy waking early when I’m travelling. There is something beautiful about watching a city rise at dawn. I wanted Amedeo to see this too, but I let him sleep in. This was his summer holiday, after all. I didn’t need to impose my rituals on my slumbering son. Besides, years of solo travel has made me value these solitary mornings. Slow coffees in the hotel café while Amedeo slept upstairs became a new ritual.

I had to pull him out of bed early one morning to begin a day-long street-food tour we’d booked. Amedeo’s foul morning mood softened with his first bite of chocolate conchas. He quickly warmed to our guide, and engaged with the others on the tour even though he was the only kid. My son isn’t shy once he gets some calories in him. Amedeo tasted almost all of the dozens of foods offered to us that day. Green chorizo. Mixiote. Quesadillas made with corn smut. The oil-bathed tacos de canasta were his favourite. He only passed on a plate of fried grubs, beetles and scorpions. That I helped raise an adventurous eater ranks as one of my greatest parental accomplishments.

Food remained the engine that ran our entire trip. We lined up for late-night churros, and drank hot and cold chocolate in cafés. We’d spend a pittance on lunches at simple taquerias. We broke the bank at restaurants in swanky neighbourhoods like Roma and La Condesa. One night we dressed in our fancy clothes and wandered through Parque Mexico before dining at Botánico. We ordered tomato and peach salad, gnocchi amatriciana, grilled cod with pea salad and a kalamata olive crème brulée that Amedeo resisted sharing. At one point my mother sent a text reading, “What else have you been doing besides eating?” Not much.

There was, of course, the wrestling. Weeks before our trip, I’d purchased tickets to a lucha libre show at Arena México, the city’s hallowed “Cathedral of Wrestling.” When I asked Amedeo if he’d rather go to Sunday’s family-oriented show or the Friday night espectacular, he said “No brainer. I want spectacular.” I booked seats in the fourth row, as close to ringside as children were allowed to sit.

Most of the matches involved six wrestlers or more, with complicated rules Amedeo and I never did figure out. No matter. We were there for the spectacle. The show was high-flying and acrobatic—far more dynamic than the North American version I’d obsessed about when I was Amedeo’s age. We joined the crowd cheering Místico, a wrestler in a silver mask and white contact lenses who was clearly the night’s hero.

Amedeo enjoyed himself, but we both knew this was my thing. A couple of times I spotted him smiling at my excitement. I’d spent 13 years relishing all of Amedeo’s tiny joys. The previous spring I watched his star turn as the villain in his junior high school play. I was just as thrilled by his weary post-play antics with his castmates as I was with his performance. I find nothing more rewarding than this conjoined happiness. At the cathedral, though, our roles were reversed.

As soon as we left the wrestling show, I got us lost on public transit. This had become another of my daily rituals. The Mexico City subway system was designed in the 1960s with pictograms for each stop so non-Spanish-speaking visitors to the city during the 1968 Olympics, and riders who couldn’t read at all, could easily navigate the city. My own ineptitude overwhelmed these generous accommodations every time. After the espectacular we made a long walk to a subway station where I dragged Amedeo in and out of the same subway car three times because I wasn’t certain where it was going. Then we transferred to a bus heading the wrong direction. I eventually gave up and called an Uber.

I can’t recall the number of times Amedeo has tried my patience over the years. Children do that, of course. But during those fraught moments on the Mexican subway, with my directional incompetence testing Amedeo’s goodwill, he never once lost his patience with me. If he rolled his eyes, and he probably did, he must’ve done so when my back was turned. Amedeo treated my failings with grace. For the second time that day I felt our roles reversed.

One night, in our hotel room, I mentioned to Amedeo that almost all the significant travelling I’ve done in my life has been alone. I wasn’t used to travelling with another person. He told me he thought this was sad.

I wanted to tell him he is wrong. I wanted to say that being his father is the only thing in my entire life that has made me happier than being out in the world alone. I wanted to explain that solitary travel means engaging with a place directly, without a companion standing between you and your experience. It means never having to compromise. Never having to make a plan. Never having to rely on anyone or be relied on. And travelling with a partner means entering a high-risk time warp: two people learn more about each other in a day on the road than in a month back home. This can be beautiful. It can also be disastrous.

But Amedeo is also right. There is something sad about my solitary time away. I am my best self on these solo journeys and nobody I love gets to see it. They get a lesser version of me. Less patient. Less adventurous. Less observant. A little less kind, even. I’m not proud of this. Maybe that’s why our trip to Mexico meant so much to me. As Amedeo enters his last chapter of childhood, I wanted to show him the man I could be.

Since we’ve been home, Amedeo regularly tells me he misses Mexico. When I ask him why, he mostly talks about the food. I choose to believe there is more to his longing than those tacos de canasta, as tasty as they were, but that’s enough for me for now. Besides, he also told me he wants to travel with me again. “Just to eat,” he said.

We should plan something soon. Amedeo starts high school this fall, and very soon he won’t want to travel with me anymore. That should make me sad, and I suppose it does in a way, but I feel nothing but joy when I imagine him in some faraway place. Gangly and tanned. With a beard worthy of his Indian-Italian genetics. Dumping a dirty backpack onto an even dirtier hostel bed. Discovering the world on his own without me.

Our happiness will be conjoined there too. The most tender place in my heart belongs to him.

Marcello Di Cintio is the author of five books, including Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers (2021), and is a former writer-in-residence with the Calgary Distinguished Writers Program. His essay “Fatherhood” was published in 2010.

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daniel zekveld says no

Policy analyst for the Association for Reformed Political Action Canada

Governments that make sex ed mandatory overstep their authority. By making sex ed opt-in, Alberta’s government is respecting parents’ authority to direct children’s education.

In R. v. Audet (1996), Supreme Court justice Gérard Vincent La Forest wrote, “Parents delegate their parental authority to teachers and entrust them with the responsibility of instilling in their children a large part of the store of learning they will acquire during their development.” That is, parents don’t relinquish their authority over a child’s education when they send the child to school but continue to exercise it. The government has a legitimate interest in ensuring children receive an education, whether in public or private schools or at home. But the content of sex ed, the moral views of parents and the position of parents in their child’s life point to the need to maintain parental authority over sex education.

Sex education in Canada varies between provinces, as do governments’ approaches to parental involvement in education. Ontario’s sex ed curriculum, for example, was updated in 2015 and 2019 to include elements such as consent, gender identity and sexual orientation, pornography, masturbation and various types of sexual activity. Sex ed curriculum today goes beyond biology, human reproduction and disease prevention. It includes more-controversial topics, at younger and younger ages. Today’s sex ed can lead parents to wonder if not what subjects are being taught, then at least how they’re being taught.

Some parents and advocates believe sex ed should emphasize abstinence as the best way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases or an unplanned pregnancy. Others might encourage children to explore their sexuality, teaching them how to have sex safely. Still others stress that sexual intimacy should be reserved for a committed relationship. There is no consensus on what should be included and at what age. Reasonable people will disagree, because sex ed goes beyond facts and into questions of morality and values. Topics such as anatomy and disease differ categorically from questions of how and when a child should become sexually active.

Beyond issues of content and different moral views is the question of who is teaching. The family, not the government or teachers, is best placed to raise children. Parents make informed decisions on how to raise their children in the context of a deep emotional and relational connection—connections that teachers can’t have to the same extent. Parents may raise their children imperfectly, but they remain best placed to decide when, where and how children receive sex education.

Provincial governments can create sex ed curriculum. It should be done in consultation with parents and provided to parents so they can continue to direct the education of the child. But the nature of the subject matter and the primary responsibility of parents make it paramount that parents can choose whether their children receive such teaching in school.

pam krause says yes

President and CEO of the Calgary-based Centre for Sexuality

The Centre for Sexuality has been serving parents, children and families in Alberta for 52 years. Our decades of experience have shown that sexual health and well-being are inextricably linked to overall health. Comprehensive sexual health education gives students vital information about their bodies, development and growth, and about important health matters such as pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). It also helps youth learn about healthy relationships, providing skills and tools around communication, decision-making and consent. All of these are essential elements in the reduction of gender-based violence.

Youth are exposed to a plethora of inaccurate and harmful information. The aim of our comprehensive sexual health education program is to help them navigate developmental changes and build knowledge, skills and motivation to make informed, healthy choices about their bodies, relationships and sexuality. Our three interconnected core components are sexual and reproductive health information, healthy relationship education, and sexual violence prevention/consent skills promotion. All of this is informed by research and evidence.

We know that parents are essential sexual health educators for children and that they can and should have conversations with their children about what they’re learning at school, no matter the subject. In fact, a conversation between parent and child in preparation for, or after, sex ed is a great opportunity to discuss family values. For example, what are the family expectations around dating, social media use etc.?

Without mandatory comprehensive sex education in schools, however, students simply don’t receive the consistent and comprehensive information to achieve healthy bodies and healthy relationships. Educators provide facts, foster critical thinking, promote respect, broaden students’ perspectives and prepare young people for the complexities of adult life. Courses in sexual health—just like biology, social studies and other core classes—play a vital role in building these skills. Mandatory sexual health education also ensures that all students have access to evidence-based information from trained educators, regardless of how conversations about sex are approached at home. Not all parents are comfortable with topics related to sexuality, and some don’t have accurate information themselves.

The benefits are clear. When youth receive quality sexual health education from professionals, they are likely to delay their first sexual experience and have lower rates of unplanned pregnancies and STIs. Sex education contributes to the prevention of intimate-partner and sexual violence. And youth who receive comprehensive sexual health education are more likely to communicate with their parents about relationships and sexuality. So sexual health education in schools isn’t about keeping parents out. It’s actually about increasing the odds that parents will be part of the conversation in the first place.

daniel zekveld responds to pam krause

Pam Krause argues for mandatory sex education, using the Centre for Sexuality’s standards as the example of what it should look like. The problem is that Canadians have different ideas about what should be taught. Mandatory sex education inevitably goes beyond basic facts. Many parents aren’t bothered by the idea of sex education per se but by allowing strangers to decide what to teach their children about sex.

Sex education means different things to different people. “Comprehensive sex education,” which covers not just the basic science of reproductive systems but also sexual relationships and decision-making, is inevitably value-laden, as is “abstinence education.” And within both there is diversity of thought and opinion.

One educator might say or imply that some types of sexual activity or relationships are inappropriate, while another might say anything goes if it’s consensual. Perhaps one educator is anti-abortion or says gender cannot be changed, while another says abortion is a legitimate response to unplanned pregnancy or that gender is fluid. Aside from value judgments, an educator might emphasize or neglect facts about certain sexual acts being riskier than others.

Choosing which topics to cover or emphasize (or not) is a value-laden proposition. As such, parents rightly want to know what their children are learning. Well-informed parents might choose to send their children to sex education at school because it aligns with their moral views and they trust how the teacher will present the information. Alternatively, they might choose to opt their child out (or not opt in) and provide sex education themselves. Governments shouldn’t prohibit them from doing so.

Krause is right that children are often exposed to “inaccurate and harmful information” and that good sex education helps to achieve positive outcomes. But Canadians’ views on “good sex education” will differ. Further, Krause hasn’t shown that good outcomes cannot be achieved without mandatory sex education.

A government that makes sex ed mandatory is inevitably choosing one approach and imposing it on everyone.

Of course, many children are exposed to harmful information. For example, many are (mis)taught about sex by pornography. That can be a major problem for families to contend with. Pornography contributes to higher rates of youth sexual activity and sexual violence. Sex education may be helpful in combatting elements of this, although educators will have differing moral perspectives on porn as well. So again, mandatory sex ed isn’t the answer. A child’s relationship with friends and family is more important than a standardized curriculum in shaping a child’s ideas about healthy sexuality and relationships. A child’s communication and relationship with mother and father is especially important.

Parents who keep their children out of sex education in school are typically those who think carefully about the issues, believe sex belongs within a context of committed relationships, and want to have a relationship with their children that includes conversations about sex. Mandatory sex education wrongly assumes that such parents will fail to educate their child.

Krause says mandatory sex education increases the likelihood that parents will have such conversations with their children. But it’s doubtful that parents who wouldn’t have these conversations if sex ed were optional will have them if it is mandatory. Mandatory sex ed might instead foster a culture in which people see the state rather than parents as responsible for teaching kids about sex. Ultimately, parents get involved because they care about what their children learn about sex.

Krause admits parents are essential sexual health educators but would mandate that they entrust their children to trained educators to learn about sex “regardless of how conversations about sex are approached at home.” But the default shouldn’t be to give the responsibility of sex ed to teachers. Mandatory sex ed denies the authority of parents to direct the education of their children, particularly as it pertains to the child’s moral upbringing.

When it comes to raising children and having difficult conversations, parents are the experts. Not necessarily because parents know all the facts and data, but because parents know their children best and have the closest relationship with them. Sex education is important. And parents remain best placed to decide when, where and how children receive such education.

Like many parents, I have my own ideas of what would be best included in sex ed curricula. I imagine that Krause would disagree with some of my ideas, and vice versa. A government that makes sex education mandatory inevitably chooses one approach to sex education and imposes it on everyone. The better solution is to respect the responsibility of parents to choose whether sex education happens at home or school.

pam krause responds to daniel zekveld

The question of whether governments should mandate sex education in schools or make it opt-in is often framed as a matter of parental rights and authority. What’s being lost in all the rhetoric is the government’s responsibility to ensure that children receive a comprehensive education that prepares them for life in the real world.

While parental involvement in sex education is important (and often times preferred), so is the necessity of making it mandatory in our schools.

The argument that sexual health education should be treated differently than other core subjects such as math or social studies minimizes the positive impact that comprehensive sexual health education has throughout life. Evidence shows that when youth learn about how to communicate, make decisions and understand consent, sexual activity is actually delayed and youth increase their knowledge of how to prevent intimate-partner violence.

I acknowledge the importance of parental involvement; however, it’s essential to strike a balance between respecting parental authority and addressing the broader public interest. Provincial governments, responsible for creating sex education curricula, should actively consult with parents to ensure their perspectives are considered. However, making sex education a choice will leave some students inadequately prepared for the complexities of relationships and sexual health.

Parental involvement and effective parent–child communication about sexual health is ideal but in reality it frequently doesn’t occur or is inadequate. Many parents don’t engage in discussions about sexual health, because of their own limited knowledge, uncertainty about what information is appropriate for different age groups or general discomfort or unease with the topic.

As a result, many parents avoid conversations about sexual health altogether or wait until their children initiate discussions. When children do ask questions, parents may respond with brief answers or quickly shut down the conversation.

Parental involvement and communication about sexual health is ideal but in reality frequently doesn’t occur.

Sex education has evolved in Canada. It reflects changes in societal norms, values and health concerns. Alberta’s decision to make sex education opt-in may appear to respect parents’ moral views, but it runs the risk of inadequately preparing children for the challenges of the modern world. The expansion of sex education beyond biology and disease prevention reflects the evolving understanding of human relationships and contributes to the holistic development of individuals.

The ongoing controversy over sex education content and delivery reflects the diverse perspectives within our society. While some parents advocate for an emphasis on abstinence, many support a more comprehensive approach. The lack of consensus on the “right” way to teach this subject underscores the need for a standardized curriculum that incorporates various perspectives while prioritizing the well-being and education of all students.

The argument that parents are best placed to raise children and make decisions about their education assumes that the family environment is universally equipped to provide accurate information or is comfortable doing so. But the reality is that families vary greatly in their ability to address sensitive topics such as sex education. Professional educators can offer a broader perspective, ensuring children receive accurate information and fostering an environment where questions are welcomed without judgment.

There’s no denying that parental involvement is a key part of com-prehensive sexual health education. Research shows that youth want to discuss sexuality and sexual health with their parents, yet often parents feel ill equipped.

At the Centre for Sexuality, we strive to provide parents with the skills to engage in conversations whenever their child wants to talk. We organize parent nights at schools, where parents can meet our educators and familiarize themselves with the topics and activities covered. Parents can even participate alongside their children.

Our aim isn’t to take over the role of parents. Rather, comprehensive sexual health education serves as the foundation for future discussion and parental guidance. Parents reinforcing family values and facilitating open discussions on complex topics are essential aspects of healthy development for children and youth.

While parents should be consulted in the development of curricula, leaving sex education as an opt-in choice risks compromising children’s comprehensive education and well-being. Striking a balance between parental involvement and societal needs is crucial to ensure that all children receive the knowledge and skills necessary for navigating the complexities of the modern world.

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What is curriculum and how does it prepare students for an unknowable future The Alberta government defines curriculum as “values, learning foundations and outcomes for Kindergarten to Grade 12 education.” In the past the process of writing and revising curriculum was generally straightforward, the work done by public servants in consultation with curricular and subject experts. That process hasn’t changed. But today curriculum has become hugely contentious—particularly social studies. Everything gets argued about in public, from who should be consulted on the curriculum, to what schools should teach, to the emphasis given to various material, to the sequence it’s taught in, to which grades to teach different ideas at, and then, finally—no small consideration—what students are asked to do with the material they’re given.

Under Hancock, the goal of revising curriculum was to present “a vision for education to 2030.” Those days of optimism would sour. Drafts of the new curriculum were criticized for emphasizing job skills over critical thinking. In March 2014 the Edmonton Journal broke news that an advisory panel for the new K–3 curriculum would include Syncrude, Suncor and Cenovus. NDP MLA Deron Bilous compared this to Scholastic’s failed 2011 effort in the US to take money from coal lobbyists and publish pro-coal education material. The news only reinforced public skepticism. Alberta’s curriculum process was tainted.

When an NDP government came to power, its goal was similar to Hancock’s. “The world is changing,” said then-minister of education David Eggen, restarting the curriculum process in 2016. “We know that the 21st century career involves using critical thinking skills… to process information, to access it and make evaluations on those higher levels.” Eggen consulted with eight subject-area working groups of about 400 people. The opposition UCP, however, decried the government’s eventual draft curriculum for, among other things, its “political correctness” and “absence” of military history. Then-leader Jason Kenney said if he became premier he’d “put that curriculum through the shredder and go right back to the drawing board.”

In the past the process was generally straightforward. But today curriculum has become hugely contentious.

Alberta’s leadership soon changed again, and the curriculum process restarted again, then slowed to a crawl, bogged down in controversy and disillusionment. The working groups were abandoned. New consultants were brought in. In March 2021 Kenney unveiled a new curriculum for all K–6 subjects. His draft was widely criticized both for its content and the way it was created. The revised social studies curriculum, in particular, was pilloried. Large chunks of it appeared to have been plagiarized. The Confederacy of Treaty 6 First Nations called it a “Eurocentric, American-focused, Christian-dominant narrative” that “perpetuates rather than addresses systemic racism.” Almost every school board in the province refused to pilot any of the new curriculum. Once more we were back to the drawing board.

In April 2022 Alberta Education released revised K–6 curriculum for math, English language arts and literature, and physical education and wellness. In March 2023 the ministry followed up with revised curriculum for science and French. Some boards announced they were prepared to let their schools pilot these curricula over the 2023–2024 school year on a voluntary basis. But social studies remained under wraps, a work in progress being assembled by civil servants under the watch of UCP education minister Adriana LaGrange and, from June 2023 onward, Demetrios Nicolaides.

In the fall of that year Alberta Education set up three groups—curriculum development specialists (“the specialists”), curriculum content contributors (“content contributors”) and teacher curriculum consultation (“teachers”)—to “inform” the continued development of social studies. The specialists were academics with expertise in pedagogy and curriculum, including Kathryn Crawford, Ambrose University; Meyranie Giroux, Conseil Scolaire Centre-Nord; J-C Couture, University of Alberta; Pierre Rousseau, Campus St-Jean (U of A); Craig Harding, Mount Royal University; Amy von Heyking, University of Lethbridge; Yvonne Poitras Pratt, University of Calgary; and David Scott, U of C.

The content contributors worked in political science departments at either the University of Calgary or the University of Alberta, with the exception of Michel Kelly-Gagnon, a lawyer and former president and CEO of the Montreal Economic Institute. The final group was composed of 27 current or retired K–12 teachers. All groups were told the government’s goal was to get a draft ready in time for piloting in the fall of 2024.

What each group did that fall isn’t easy to discern. Terms of reference obtained through a freedom of information request showed the roles and responsibilities for each group were almost identical. All participants were asked to contribute social studies subject matter knowledge according to their particular expertise, review the draft curriculum and provide feedback, and engage in online and in-person “working sessions.” All group members were required to sign non-disclosure agreements. The teachers were given one additional requirement: “Be curriculum champions throughout the curriculum development and implementation process.”

Only after their engagement with Alberta Education was over and a revised draft had been made public in March 2024 did members of the specialists group speak out. In an open letter they said they were “deeply disappointed” to discover that their input had been ignored. They deplored the curriculum’s “failure to define key social studies concepts… such as critical thinking, citizenship, historical thinking, inquiry and multiple perspectives,” the limited opportunities it offered for critical thinking, and the tokenistic gesture made toward Alberta’s diversity generally and First Nations, Métis and Inuit worldviews and perspectives specifically. “An absence of clear purpose has created a random sequence of learning moments rather than a coherent animating vision,” they wrote. “Instead of a program that inspires hope and possibility for engaging the pressing issues of our world, this draft is an exhausting and unwieldy roadmap to a better version of yesterday.” In conclusion, they said the government must start over.

One of the authors of that letter was Couture, an adjunct lecturer of education at U of A. “The current programs bolted together just don’t work,” he said in March 2024. “The idea under Minister Hancock in 2010 was ‘less is more.’ We need to cut down on the content [i.e., facts] and focus on skills and competencies. That never happened.”

In an interview that March with CBC, Couture said it looked like the government had made token attempts to integrate pedagogical and curricular experts’ feedback. “Unfortunately, it’s a case of lifting key words and phrases and inserting them into what the government was planning to do anyway, which is still a very knowledge-based curriculum,” he said. “Knowledge-based” might sound good—but the approach, he said, is overwhelming. “How can you claim that you’re going to have time to do critical thinking and inquiry… when I am, as a Grade 6 student, being trotted through 100 knowledge items on the history of democracy, going back to ancient Greece and Rome and the evolution of the Magna Carta?

Carla Peck, a professor of social studies education at the U of A, says she spoke with Jennifer Cassidy, assistant deputy minister for Alberta Education, in October 2023, and was told that the draft curriculum was already complete. Nevertheless, that fall the ministry conducted a general survey, eventually completed by “more than 12,800” Albertans, about what people would like to see in the new social studies. The fact that a draft was complete wasn’t explained. From September 2023 to January 2024, ministry officials met with teachers, multicultural organizations, Indigenous and francophone communities and other education specialists for a series of curriculum consultations to supplement feedback from the three working groups. Yet very few of these people were actually allowed to see the draft. It’s unclear what their advice was, or whether it was taken into consideration.

At a glance, draft curricula from different Alberta governments generally have a common look. All subjects, from social studies to math to physical education, are presented in the form of a table. In the NDP government’s 2018 draft, for example, the table was organized into guiding questions, learning outcomes, conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge and competencies. An “essential understanding” spans Kindergarten to Grade 4. The UCP government’s drafts are similarly organized, with slightly different categories: organizing ideas, guiding questions, learning outcomes, knowledge, understanding, and skills and procedures.

The criticism of Alberta’s recent social studies drafts generally starts with their framework. Lindsay Gibson is an assistant professor of curriculum and pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. Back in 2017 he was an assistant professor in social studies education at the U of A and part of Alberta Education’s curriculum-writing group—until he resigned in November 2018. His resignation letter to minister Eggen was critical of many aspects of the draft curriculum, but particularly the framework, also described as the “architecture.” “Alberta Education has been unwilling to make even the slightest changes to the framework even when presented with evidence that it isn’t helping teachers write learning outcomes that are clear and purposeful,” he wrote.

Gibson argued that the 2018 framework failed to present a “coherent understanding of history and geography,” adding that Alberta’s existing K–12 curriculum was already ranked last among all provinces and territories by Historica Canada for how well it addressed Canadian history and citizenship. (Historica is a national charity best known for its “Heritage Minute” ads and for publishing The Canadian Encyclopedia.) Eggen’s revised curriculum was unlikely to fare better, Gibson wrote, describing it as “far too present-focused.”

His criticisms echo how Alberta’s specialist group in spring 2024 decried the UCP government draft’s lack of an overarching vision. In their case, however, they saw in the framework too much emphasis on the past and too little on the present—a focus “largely on learning outcomes that do not ask students to think critically about events and issues in our world today.”

The main difference between NDP-era and UCP-era curricula is perhaps hinted at by these overarching frameworks. Eggen’s draft, for example, contains this high-level “essential understanding”: “Active citizenship contributes to the vitality of communities that can promote pluralism among diverse people in a democratic society.” In the UCP government’s 2021 draft, “essential understandings” had become “organizing ideas,” and many of them are longer, for example: “Understanding the history of our province, nation and world and developing cultural literacy allow us to appreciate the varied richness of our shared human inheritance of original writings, artifacts, stories, beliefs, ideas and great cultural and artistic achievements from different times and places. Lessons of the past and knowledge of diverse experiences help us overcome ignorance and prejudice and recognize our common humanity and dignity.”

Peck shared the specialist group’s concern about the UCP draft’s overarching emphasis on lessons of the past. “In this curriculum, ‘knowledge’ just means facts,” she wrote on her blog. “In history education… powerful knowledge means more than the mere accumulation of facts and dates… It also includes helping students learn how knowledge is created.”

Other criticisms of the curriculum rewriting process have included how one subject integrates with others taught at the same grade level. Peck, for example, argued that the April 2024 Social Studies draft won’t inform other subjects. “The argument behind having a common architecture [across curricula] is that it’s supposed to make it easier for teachers to do cross-curricular planning,” she said in an interview. “When they’re looking at the science [curriculum] and they’re looking at social studies, they can see connections.” But the authors of this draft “haven’t actually done a comparative analysis of what students are being asked to learn in math in Grade 3 and social studies in Grade 3 to make sure that the concepts are actually aligned.”

As an example, Peck referred to the learning outcome in the draft that requires Grade 2 students to “explore ways trade and taxation support local communities.” Specifically, the “knowledge” section expects students to learn that governments collect money through taxes, which is used to provide services such as police, healthcare and education. Peck argued this isn’t an age-appropriate expectation. “In math, they haven’t yet developed the number sense to make sense of these things.” She added, on her blog, “The concept of ‘government’ is too abstract for kids of this age.”

John, an assistant principal and teacher at a southside Edmonton K–6 school (who asked that I not use his real name), agreed. “To talk about the specifics of taxation policies and what the municipal government is responsible for—that’s stuff I’m having problems with [in] Grade 6 every year,” he said. When asked if the revised curriculum has an overall coherence, John laughed. “I think [we] used to have that in the old curriculum.” He says topics have become “mixed up” and “moved all over the place.”

This latter criticism seems borne out by comparing UCP drafts. The 2021 curriculum, for example, asked that Grade 2 students learn about the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who went from Italy to China, visited the court of Kublai Khan and travelled along the famous Silk Road, a vast trading route. This was listed in the “knowledge” column of the table, underneath a heading called “encounters with other worlds.” Over in the corresponding “skills and procedures” column, students were asked to “retell the story of Marco Polo’s journey to the Orient and back, and what he discovered in the Far East.” But in the 2024 draft the story of Marco Polo had disappeared entirely. This invites the question: If Marco Polo’s voyage had been considered essential content just a couple of years before, why was it now omitted It gives credence to the charge that this curriculum lacks a guiding rationale.

Peck also worried the revised curriculum left little room for student inquiry. The government “has clearly [indicated] whatever answer they think is the most appropriate for the guiding question and the learning outcome,” she said. Because of that, the curriculum “is very prescriptive.”

In 2021 Jason Kenney’s new curriculum was widely criticized both for its content and the way it was created.

Much criticism of the UCP’s March 2024 draft curriculum and earlier drafts alike involves their treatment of First Peoples. The 2018 version unveiled by Eggen, for example, with mandatory lessons on residential school history, colonialism and treaties, was dismissed for its “political correctness”; the 2021 draft issued by Kenney was deemed dismissive of Indigenous people and was at worst “racist.” Dwayne Donald, the Canada Research Chair in Reimagining Teacher Education with Indigenous Wisdom Traditions, said the process has been frustrating. “The way in which we argue about what should be in there is a distraction that serves the needs of the government,” he says. “We need to create a vision… about how to understand ourselves in relation to each other, how to understand ourselves in relation to the life all around us.”

Donald believes the latest curriculum continues to lack a unifying vision for how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people could live together. “We have treaties, and they’re sacred covenants, and they have been a massive curricular omission in our country.”

On April 26, 2024, minister Nicolaides held a press conference to announce that the curriculum had been revised yet again. The previous draft had been criticized for its reliance on lower-order verbs in the skills and procedures category, which Peck had argued encouraged less cognitive complexity and demanded less intellect and creativity of students. Among those verbs, many fell into the category of “remember.” Peck had found numerous verbs in the March 2024 draft that were stand-ins for “remember,” in particular “describe” and “identify.” But this revised draft had higher-order verbs including “evaluate” and “create,” indicating skills of greater complexity. In a briefing following the press conference, Alberta Education said that “verbs used in skills and procedures have been strengthened to encourage critical thinking.”

The revised curriculum had other tweaks. The changes reduced what some critics had seen as a too-heavy load and too much focus on memorization, and rearranged content to be more age-appropriate. Taxation, previously introduced at Grade 2 in the draft released just one month previously, would now be discussed for the first time in Grade 5.

Among the notable changes revealed in April were additional First Nations, Métis, Inuit and francophone histories, contributions and perspectives. But while the curriculum’s focus on First Nations, Inuit and Métis had expanded from the 2021 draft to the 2024 version, omissions remained. Nowhere in the new curriculum are K–6 students expected to learn about residential schools. This is despite the Truth and Reconciliation’s Call to Action 62(i), which calls on provinces to “make age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties and Aboriginal peoples’ historical and contemporary contributions to Canada a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade 12 students.” Nicolaides said that some apparent omissions “relate to content in junior high and high school. So obviously, we haven’t developed that content. [But] I’m sure we’ll be able to address that.”

The Alberta Teachers’ Association had panned the March 2024 draft and wasn’t reassured by the April revision. In May the ATA called for the curriculum process to be paused. “We welcomed the opportunity to provide feedback… unfortunately, teachers’ recommendations aren’t reflected in this most recent draft,” said ATA president Jason Schilling. “Rather than proceeding to pilot a curriculum that we know is flawed, let’s take the time needed to get it right.” Among teachers’ unresolved concerns, he said, are a still-unrealistic number of concepts, some of which remain “developmentally inappropriate and conceptually inaccurate,” as well as a persistent failure to engage higher-order thinking skills.

Paul (not his real name), an elementary school teacher in Grande Prairie, is concerned that the latest revision still provides no guidance on how social studies classes should approach current events. This is quite unlike the 2005 program of study, which states that “the infusion of current events, issues and concerns is an essential component of social studies.” That version describes how to use current events as a teaching tool.

Paul speculates that the omission of current events from the 2024 draft is a result of a new code of professional conduct for teachers that took effect in January 2023 (and is now enforced by the Alberta Teaching Profession Commission, not the ATA). Under this code, a teacher may not teach in a manner that exploits their “ideological advantage.” By this, the government says, it means “perspectives taught to students in a biased manner with the intent to take advantage of a student’s uninformed or under-informed opinions.” Ministry staff say a similar provision is in effect in BC, and that the intent is “to make sure teachers and teacher leaders do not exploit students for material, ideological or other advantage while in a position of authority.” In Paul’s view, with the new code in effect and no guidance from the curriculum, “teachers could be nervous” about using news stories as opportunities to make learning more relevant.

A lack of clear purpose in 2024 “created a random sequence of learning moments rather than a coherent animating vision.”

Minister Nicolaides seemed to believe the 14-year process of revising Alberta’s social studies curriculum was finally making some headway. “I think our approach has been to take politics out of the classroom and give students a deep understanding of history, to understand an evolving and complex world, and give students the skills that they need to be successful,” he said at the April press conference.

He may have been too optimistic. A week later, at a May 3 debate in Edmonton between the (then) five candidates seeking the NDP leadership, all said the UCP government had irrevocably politicized the development and content of social studies. All five pledged to start the process over if they become premier. “We’ve got to ditch this curriculum,” said Naheed Nenshi. “You have my pledge that I will put experts back at the front of that process,” said Sarah Hoffman. The way we should rewrite curriculum, said Gil McGowan, “is by handing it over to professionals, including teachers, doing it on a regular cycle instead of all at once, providing a proper amount of time for piloting and development.”

Alberta’s new social studies curriculum will be piloted in nine school boards in September 2024. While it’s possible that more tweaks will have been made, the April 2024 version is likely the one that will be rolled out provincewide in fall 2025. That is, until it’s scrapped, and we start the process all over again.

Laurence Miall is the author of Blind Spot (NeWest Press, 2014) and writes on politics and culture for various publications.

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Caylan Ford says yes

Co-founder of Alberta Classical Academy, which opened in Calgary in August 2022

In 1994 Alberta became the only province in the country to allow charter schools. Despite steady growth in popularity—today over 11,000 Alberta students attend charter schools, and twice that number are on waitlists—these schools remain beset by controversy and misunderstanding.

I can dispatch some common misconceptions. First, charter schools aren’t “private” schools, except under the most tortured definition of the term. They cannot charge tuition, and they receive the same per-pupil funding from the Ministry of Education as other public schools. Rather than being governed by large, union-dominated bureaucracies, charters are overseen by volunteer, non-profit boards, which are typically elected by their parent communities. Charter schools are accountable in ways that other public schools are not: if they’re mismanaged, or if educational targets aren’t met, families simply won’t enrol and the school’s charter will be revoked. Teachers are subject to the same certification requirements as in other schools, but—and this is key to understanding the opposition to these programs—they aren’t unionized. Charters are prohibited from having any religious affiliation, and they serve special-needs students at a rate comparable to other public school boards.

Each charter school has a unique philosophy or approach—for example, a focus on music, Indigenous culture, all-girls education, STEM, or traditional pedagogy. At the smartphone-free classical charter school I helped establish, students wear uniforms, learn ancient languages, study the traditional liberal arts and seek to orient themselves towards truth, wisdom and beauty. Inspired by Jacques-Louis David’s neo-classical painting The Death of Socrates, Grade 6 pupils made a play re-enacting Plato’s Phaedo dialogue. The Grade 1 students, meanwhile, were making faux papyrus and comparing the writing technologies of Egypt’s old and middle kingdoms, China and Mesopotamia.

Charters are not “elite” institutions. When we opened the Calgary Classical Academy we enrolled everyone who applied, until we ran out of space. Over 900 students have requested enrollment for next year, but our building can hold fewer than 300. Our experience is not unusual in the charter school world.

Some students are drawn to charter schools because they better suit their unique aptitudes and interests. A 10-year-old told me she enrolled at Calgary Classical Academy because she wanted to perform Shakespeare and learn Latin. She recited her favourite poems from memory and described the differences in metre. Other families are drawn to us because their local schools teach ideological content that undermines their values. But the largest share of families enrolled because they felt that the neighbourhood public schools were failing their kids: more than a few had made it to upper elementary without learning to decode words, perform simple arithmetic or hold a pencil. For families who can’t afford private schools, charters are the best hope to escape the tyranny of mediocrity and low expectations.

Michael Mindzak says no

Assistant professor for the Faculty of Education at Brock University

Charter schools are back in the news as Alberta expands a model brought into the province in 1994. Back then the experiment was defended for offering “competition,” “choice” and “innovation.” Since then, however, charters haven’t lived up to the hype, yet they continue to exist in a quasi-public/private state. Despite the UCP government’s renewed support, charter schools remain both unimpressive and fundamentally problematic for public education.

First, look at the money. Every day in education we see the challenges of limited funding and resources. But charters are given fewer public resources to spend on students than traditional schools are, in part because they’re exempt from the requirement to provide special needs education and are generally expected to cover their own capital costs. This in itself should give anyone pause: Why would we want to support a system of schooling that has fewer resources Charters struggle to make up for this deficit, including by entering into corporate partnerships (as one Alberta charter did with Enbridge) or by charging parents for higher transportation costs. But the government’s reason for promoting these schools is clear: to make education more “efficient” and to “do more with less.”

Now simply look at US’s more expansive charter experiment. Several states enacted charters in the 1990s, with Alberta riding this wave. But since then, many of these jurisdictions have encountered a plethora of issues, from for-profit mandates and mismanagement of funds, to mid-year school closures, limited transparency and accountability, exclusionary admissions practices and segregation. Many of these issues are due to the loose laws and policies that allow charter schools to run as private entities. Again, we might pause: Why would we support a system of “public” education that’s geared towards supporting private interests Charter proponents will say these are public schools, but in reality they act as private organizations.

Meanwhile every province in Canada has moved toward furthering teacher professionalization as well as unionization. These groups (here both roles are covered by the Alberta Teachers’ Association) advocate for teachers’ working conditions as well as students’ learning conditions. But charter schools in Alberta and elsewhere aren’t required to hire unionized teachers. Non-union teachers typically have less job security, lower wages and fewer opportunities for professional development. How do we want our teachers to be treated In the US, teacher attrition and shortages are the norm, especially in states where anti-union laws and charter schools abound.

In short, Alberta is an aberration, not an innovator. Charter schools were a neoliberal experiment in the early 1990s, and now, almost 30 years later, little if any evidence demonstrates their success in any meaningful way. They should be considered a failed policy, solely a means of pushing public education further into private hands.

Caylan Ford responds to Michael Mindzak

Professor Mindzak offers several arguments for why Alberta should not have charter schools, which I’ll summarize as follows: 1) charter schools are less well funded than other public schools; 2) they are unimpressive; 3) some American states have adopted for-profit models; and 4) charter school teachers are not unionized, and may therefore have poor job security and fewer opportunities for professional development.

It’s true that charter schools have often had to make do with less. Until very recently in Alberta, charter students were entitled to a small fraction of the Specialized Learning Support (SLS) grants that their peers in regular public schools received. Charters also lacked access to funds for capital maintenance and repairs, and many are housed in small, outdated buildings vacated by larger school boards. Transportation challenges are also substantial: unlike neighbourhood public schools, charters accept students from across their geographic areas, and some students spend over two hours on a bus each day.

I’ll happily concede that these conditions are suboptimal. But that’s not an argument for dismantling charter schools; it’s an argument for funding them more equitably, which is exactly what Alberta’s UCP government has sought to do. Over the last four years, the UCP has worked to level the playing field for charter schools by funding new capital projects, increasing transportation funding and equalizing SLS grants.

Charters aren’t governed by large bureaucracies or subjected to the demands of teachers unions.

Despite historical funding disadvantages, charter schools have done more with less. The largest charter in Alberta, Foundations for the Future Charter Academy (FFCA), disproportionately serves lower-income and new Canadians. It topped the Fraser Institute school rankings while occupying a building that was literally crumbling (no exaggeration—the roof collapsed). Some 14,000 students are on the waitlist. To compete with FFCA’s success, the Calgary Board of Education has launched several schools emulating its pedagogical approach, and now those schools too have lengthy wait lists. If that’s not “impressive,” then the word has no meaning.

Charter schools are of course not monolithic. They have different philosophies, and some are more successful than others. US states also have widely varying statutory requirements for charter schools, with a few allowing for-profit models (this is not the case in Alberta). But charter schools generally have achieved better academic results than traditional public schools serving comparable student populations. Some, like KIPP programs in New York or the Michaela School in the UK, are world-leading examples of innovation, and they contribute enormously to the social mobility of disadvantaged students.

Part of the charter advantage derives from the fact that they’re not governed by large, immovable bureaucracies. Nor are they subject to the demands of teachers unions, which invariably privilege the interests of their members over the best interest of students and families.

Charter schools in Alberta pay teachers at a rate comparable to other public schools, but they do not have to hire or retain underperforming teachers. Charters have more freedom and flexibility to respond to changing circumstances and adapt to new research on educational best practices. And rather than being run by a quadrennially elected group of school board trustees you couldn’t pick out of a crowd, charter schools are governed by their own non-profit boards comprised of parents and community members. The advantages may be obvious, but just to drive the point home: when our Calgary Classical Academy charter school was  struggling to find enough bus drivers, one of our volunteer directors became a bus driver. It’s little wonder that parents of children enrolled in US charter schools report much higher satisfaction than those in public or private schools.

On the question of teacher satisfaction and professional development, I’ll offer an anecdotal response: at Calgary Classical Academy teacher retention is 100 per cent. One of our teachers reported that they learned more about effective pedagogy in their first two weeks on the job than in all their previous teaching assignments. Each has an ambitious professional development plan, and the faculty book club is currently making their way through Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

Monopolies are great for system insiders who are insulated from choice or competition, but they don’t provide good services. They are ponderous and inflexible, and because their users and consumers have no alternative options, there is little incentive to improve. This was true of Soviet automobile manufacturers, and it’s true in education too. If you believe education should prioritize the interests of children, families and the common good above the interests of union bosses and bureaucrats, then you should support Alberta’s charter schools.

Michael Mindzak responds to Caylan Ford

It’s a pleasure to respond to Caylan Ford, as it gives me an opportunity to further highlight and critique the key issues that demonstrate the limitations—if not overt problems—of charter schools and the movement towards further educational privatization.

I have no reason to doubt that charter schools in Alberta, including Calgary Classical Academy, are doing great work with their students. But as Ford’s argument highlights at length, charter schools must engage in significant amounts of marketing in order to attract and retain students. This then leads to questions surrounding charters’ use of limited resources for marketing activities rather than, say, for supporting students and teachers in the classroom. Driven by market competition, charters must act like businesses and focus energy on marketing their schools accordingly. And while we can understand why parents want to send their children to schools that purportedly offer strong opportunities for learning and growth, and why these schools have waiting lists, we might also reflect on how marketing itself partly explains higher demand for charter schools.

This also raises the key question of how exactly charter schools select students for admission. On what grounds does Calgary Classical Academy, for example, decide which students to include and which to exclude Is it possible that charter schools hold some biases in their selection process—for example, declining students with special learning needs or exceptionalities Public school systems aren’t afforded this luxury, and thereby accept the inherent challenges that come with educating large, diverse and heterogeneous student populations. Any system of education based on selection and exclusion should be subjected to careful scrutiny, as the promise of “cream skimming” (selecting only the “best” students) fundamentally represents the values of elitism.

The purpose of charter schools is to foster privatization under the guise of public education.

Ford says some families are drawn to charters due to the “ideological content” of public schools. But every charter school has a particular ideology. An inherent feature of the charter model is a move towards “balkanization,” whereby students from different social backgrounds or groups are increasingly separated from one another. Under the auspices of “parental choice,” charters encourage educational segregation. No school is completely value-free, but while public schools, broadly speaking, hold certain ideals (such as the value of multiculturalism), they’re far from homogeneous or hegemonic. In a period of growing political polarization and extremism, charter schools create further divisions. Overall, inclusive public schools foster more understanding and a greater sense of cohesion in our democratic society.

Ford implies that unionized teachers are a problem. But teachers, in Alberta and beyond, weren’t forced to collectively organize. They did so though years of effort and advocacy—seeking to professionalize and diversify the workforce. Yet charter proponents are quick to argue that unions are the problem with education, and non-unionized teachers are the solution. But the solution to what… Canada’s hundreds of thousands of unionized teachers, in classrooms every day, have proposed many ways to improve outcomes for all students, such as smaller class sizes and more preparation time for teachers. Private and charter school proponents’ opposition to such reforms reflects a political rather than pedagogical position.

Charter advocates are also quick to say public schools are failing—or, in Ford’s words, falling prey to the “tyranny of mediocrity.” But Canada’s public schools do exceptionally well on international rankings, including quantitative and qualitative assessments. Alberta—where 92 per cent of students are in a public school—consistently performs among the top jurisdictions in the world, according to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). If you look past the rhetoric, our public education systems, while imperfect, are impressive.

One of Ford’s first assertions is that charter schools aren’t private schools, yet in her final words she effectively equates charter schools with private schools. This confusion isn’t uncommon—the purpose of charter schools is to foster privatization under the guise of public education. My main issue with charters isn’t at the individual level—every charter school cares about its own students, families and community—but rather their purpose as a whole. Fundamentally, charter schools were created with the intention of furthering private education and subverting the public sphere. Alberta’s government in 2019 demanded the removal of the word “public” from all school boards, continuing a decades-long drift toward normalizing private models of education. This subversion continues today through the expansion of Alberta’s charter school model, and, notably, continues to run counter to what the rest of Canada is doing.

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