Evidence in the surroundings shows that Palliser was correct, for a time. Patchy remnant shelterbelts of hardy caragana and feral crabapple trees and the unpainted, wind-tilted shacks and timber-gutted barns of old farms mark like gravesites the long-ghostly hopes of early-century dryland homesteaders, their dreams long-since blown away like dust by bad farming practice and countless chinooks.

But today, where the broken dreams and mostly unbroken prairie had been, there are now leafy greens, ochred seedheads and shiny golden stubble of a dozen kinds of cash crops. Leggy-wheeled, spray-fuzzed irrigation pivots spread in all directions like aluminum-and-rubber centipedes, each nearly half a kilometre long. And near and far, clutches of shiny galvanized steel bins rise—tonnes of grain in each.

Those early, failed homesteaders might be mystified at the prosperity of this remote corner of the province today. John Palliser would be stunned. The first answers to this mysterious reversal are in the landscape itself. The useless land Palliser referred to was actually an area of mixed sandy loam soils, well suited for growing high-value crops such as vegetables, but too porous to hold water. And whereas the great plains to the east are flat and largely featureless, the land here slopes in great ocean swells gently down toward the hidden valley of the South Saskatchewan River. After the dustbowls of extreme drought in the 1930s drove most farmers off this land, the province invested heavily in the 1950s in industrial-scale irrigation systems that brought water from the South Saskatchewan up onto the shortgrass prairie.

Adding water to sandy loam in a region that receives the highest number of sunshine hours per year in Canada wouldn’t have been enough for such a transformation, though. The other critical ingredient that would make this land flourish is here, in the din of a potato harvest operation run like a military campaign, with pop-up factories, fleets of trucks, and dawn-to-dusk frenzy: an army of temporary labourers as available, cheap and disposable as the water of the river below.

In the main farmyard where the potato factory is set up, the driver of a full spud truck performs a lumbering yet precise manoeuvre, slipping around an emptied outgoing truck and pirouetting into a waiting position. He looks for the signal to reverse from the backer, a Cree man of slight build, 64-year-old Elmer Crookedneck. Elmer is dressed in safety gear and giving signals like an aircraft marshal on a flight deck. When the truck is in position at the factory’s receiving conveyor under Elmer’s guidance, the driver—another Cree man, stocky, in jeans, rodeo buckle and cowboy boots, 58-year-old Dwayne Ernest—jumps from the high step of the truck to scoot back and help Elmer with the controls of the tipper bed. The two men shout to each other over the din while they work buttons and levers, and another five tonnes of large, dirt-clad golden potatoes begins to roll out of the tipper chute in a steady stream onto the conveyor.

Dwayne spends a few minutes helping Elmer with “grading,” the primary job at a potato harvesting factory. The two scan the stream of spuds rolling up the conveyor towards the first giant holding bin, and reach over the clattering belt to grab and throw into smaller loader bins behind them whatever they can of the rocks, damaged spuds, potato vines and lumps of clay the size of footballs: anything that is not a good potato.

The tipper empties, and Elmer directs the change-out of Dwayne’s truck for the next in under a minute. The river of potatoes rumbles up to the belt past two Mennonite boys working brooms under the conveyor and passes by the watchful eyes and quick hands of six Mennonite women in the wooden grading shack built over the conveyor behind the second holding bin. The stream of spuds will spill onto another conveyor and travel 80 feet or more past five more Mennonite women graders, then climb past two Mennonite men working at another conveyor that angles high into the mouth of the nearest of the two giant storage bins. The fully graded stream of potatoes will finally pile out where two more Mennonite women are moving high and deep in the shadows of the bin, directing the unloading end of the conveyor.

None of these workers nor most of the dozens of truck and tractor drivers and other workers are permanent employees of this farm. They are what economists call “reserve armies of labour,” underemployed populations available and ready to show up for a few weeks at harvest time when suddenly thousands of drivers and backers and graders and pilers and sweepers are needed on farms across southern Alberta, to work like mad until the fields are empty and the bins are full. And people like Elmer and Dwayne and a handful of others represent the last of the forgotten army of thousands of Cree workers—mostly from northern Saskatchewan—who for crucial decades were critical to farming operations like these and instrumental in building this corner of the province into the vast, wealthy agricultural empire it is today.

An army of temporary labourers is as available, cheap and disposable as the water of the river below.

Few Canadians know the legacy of Cree people from Saskatchewan working on southern Alberta farms. The Potato Growers of Alberta’s 50 Years of Working Together commemorative book at the old irrigation museum in Taber does not contain a single photo or word about Cree workers in any of its 400-plus pages. Even the Dutch-Canadian farmer I met a few kilometres from here didn’t seem to know much about Cree workers. “I used to use Dutch exchange students,” he says with a shrug. “Now I only use Mexican Mennonite workers.”

Yet many untold thousands of Cree people have worked on southern Alberta’s farms in the last half century, especially in sugar beet and potato production. Ron Laliberté—a Métis man and retired professor of sociology and indigenous studies—spent months interviewing Cree workers and beet farmers in southern Alberta in the early 1990s. He says the Canadian government began recruiting Cree labourers for sugar beet farmers after the latter lost easy access to labour by Japanese-Canadians “evacuated” from BC during the Second World War. The first buses in 1953 brought 120 Cree workers. By the 1980s the number had climbed to 3,000 Cree workers and at least 2,000 Metis and non-status Indians per year—the largest employment of First Nations people in Canada since the days of the fur trade. By the 1990s Cree workers made up 85 per cent of the labour force on sugar beet farms. During some seasons, up to 95 per cent of the men of some reserves in northern Saskatchewan were working on farms in southern Alberta.

Laliberté says that for those not willing to come of their own accord, the sugar beet industry pushed the government to cut social benefits during the months the Cree workers were needed down south. He says the Cree workers, always using humour to cope, started calling themselves “Grab-a-hoe Indians.”

The work at the factory pushes on under floodlights until nearly 9:00 p.m. The Mennonite boys and young women head straight for their family homes in the surrounding hamlets and farms. Elmer, Dwayne and two more Cree men—Dwayne’s brother Clem Ernest, 47, and their nephew, Jeremy Crookedneck, 27—make a quick supper in the shop kitchen, the same as they had for lunch: ham sandwiches with Velveeta slices and cans of Coca Cola. They take turns in the single shower and climb the stairs up to a storage room above the kitchen where they have four cots, a small living area for boots and gear carved out of a jumble of racks, boxes, desks and old computers. When I arrive, Dwayne is seated on a cot at the back of the room, pulling off his boots. “It’s his birthday today,” he says, pointing with his lips, Cree-fashion, toward the bed across from him, where Elmer is already asleep.

Left to right: Clem Ernest, Elmer Crookedneck, Dwayne Ernest and Jeremy Crookedneck.

I have known these men’s families since I was a boy and my preacher dad would take our family to the Little Island Lake reserve at Ministikwan, Saskatchewan, for camp meetings. Dwayne’s crews used to meet me at the racetrack in Lethbridge on a Sunday afternoon every harvest. After the races, we would have a kind of Thanksgiving dinner together at my house. Ten years ago my dining and living room would be full of Cree men and women around the table and at TV trays. Last visit, there were only five Cree men at our table, no women. This season Dwayne told me there would be only four in the crew, and they didn’t have gas money to make it to Lethbridge on the Sunday. I asked to come out to the farm at Bow Island to witness what might be one of the last crews, before their people’s legacy of work here fades away, unremembered.

Elmer wakes up, turns and sits on the edge of his cot. His T-shirt has the picture of a rodeo bronc rider and the words “Bucking Cancer!” on the front. He has been at the work for nearly a week already. He looks weary. He speaks to Dwayne in Cree for a few moments before turning to speak with me.

Elmer Crookedneck.

“One of my first memories is coming down here by bus from Meadow Lake,” he says. “We stayed at a house in Vauxhall, my whole family. I started hoeing sugar beets when I was 10 years old. A few years later, we started working potatoes, and have ever since. One of my sons was born here during a harvest 24 years ago.”

Elmer says this is his first job since he was diagnosed with prostate cancer five years ago. After surgery, the cancer was still there, so he had to do radiation therapy. He tried to work driving heavy equipment after the radiation but couldn’t last more than a few hours a day. He says he took this job because he has family to support, kids and grandkids, one living with him. “And I would rather work than get money for free.”

The next day I tag along with Dwayne in his spud truck to a harvest “circle” about 20 km from this farm, one of a conglomerate of five farms called Quattro Ventures Inc. Irrigation farmers use the term “circle” to mean the 130 acres that an irrigation pivot can cover out of the 160 acres of a typical quarter section. This conglomerate farms 162 circles, or about 23,000 acres, with 40 per cent of them dry, 60 per cent irrigated. The company agronomist, Emily Ford, says that because potato crops must be rotated to prevent scab and other diseases, they follow a “one-in-six” rule, only planting a circle with potatoes once every six years. So, to be a potato grower, you need access to a lot of land. In the off years the company will plant other high-value crops such as peppermint, beans, peas, seed canola and hemp. But potatoes remain king. (Estimated value in southern Alberta: $3-billion per year.) Ford says because of increasing water scarcity, the irrigation district allocates only 10 inches of water per year per acre for potatoes. She says a good crop requires 18 inches of water, about 1,800 cubic metres (nearly half a million gallons) per acre. Farmers cover any deficit by borrowing water allocations from their other, less water-intensive crops such as wheat.

Neighbouring farmer Tony Varekamp delivers meals to Corny Neufeld and other Mennonite workers.

Dwayne, like Elmer, has been working on southern Alberta farms since he was a boy and has spent the last 22 years working for this one. He says he can make more money in three days here than in three weeks of driving school bus back on the reserve. He also drives truck for the farm during spring planting and other harvests. In total, he works here about three months of the year. He says he keeps coming back because of his friendship with the farm owner, Lloyd Ypma. Each season, he tries to recruit other people from the reserve to come work with him. Fewer come each year.

At the field, Dwayne steers his large “tipper” truck into position at the end of a furrow and waits for the call to tag-in when the harvester has filled the truck ahead. The harvester pauses only moments for Dwayne’s truck to line up under the unloading spout, then the machine and truck move in tandem at pace, both harvesting and transferring the fresh spuds simultaneously. The moving transfer takes only five minutes. The harvester waves off the filled truck and calls in the next. Dwayne drives back to the main farm in the blinding dust of other trucks, artfully dodging trucks from other farms at gravelled intersections, no thought of slowing down.

The reason for the hurry is in the grey sky to the north. Farmers grow potatoes as late into the season as they can for maximum yields, but if they don’t get the crop off before the first freeze, an operation like this can lose millions of dollars in a single night. Drivers like Dwayne wake at 4:30 a.m. to be out to the circles by 5:15. The factory crew starts at 5:30 when the first loaded trucks are coming in, and everybody works until the last trucks come into the factory well after dark, unless the weather is too hot. Operations shut down for heat, not out of concern for the crews but because putting hot potatoes into cool storage bins could cause the whole lot to rot.

Because of the frenzied pace of the work and the exhaustion of the men at day’s end, it is hard to interview some of them during the week. But as most of the potato farms around Bow Island are owned by church-going Dutch Calvinists, the crews get Sundays off and sometimes a Saturday evening like this one. I find the Ministikwan crew sitting in camp chairs in the dark around the tailgate of Dwayne’s pickup parked in the farm shop—now eerily quiet—sharing a pack of Bud Lite.

The men tell me Elmer has already gone to bed. They call him “mushum,” the Cree word for “grandfather.” Dwayne and his brother Clem have been visiting quietly, nursing their beers, while nephew Jeremy plays a game on his phone, coping. When I take out my camera, Dwayne and Clem hide their beers. Even though it’s only a few hard-earned drinks at the end of a long week, they know the stigma about Native people and alcohol.

Jeremy puts his phone away for a few moments to tell me this is his first harvest and first real job. He says he wishes he had weighed himself before he came. He had trouble staying on his feet the first few days, backing trucks and chipping soil from the inner sides of their tipper beds, but has adapted and feels like he is getting into shape. He wants to get a permanent job when he gets home to the reserve. His uncles tell him they’re proud of him.

Clem is quiet, serious, a deep thinker with a strong jaw. Tonight is the first time he speaks to me. He asks if I know how many Native people have lived on these lands, how many languages they speak, how many thousands of years they have been here. And how many Cree people used to work on these farms.

He tells me about seeing old photos of his grandparents and parents hoeing sugar beets, thinning and weeding in the blazing heat, sometimes three times per field per season, through spring and long summer days. “It looked like the cotton fields down South,” he says. “The pay was something like that, too.”

Clem and Dwayne confirm what Laliberté says he heard when talking with Cree workers in the early 1990s. Cree people started to lose their place in the sugar beet fields in the 1970s when farmers started bringing in dual-nationality Mennonites from colonies in Mexico, who would work for less money, sometimes bidding for fields at half the rate that Cree people were paid. When farmers started using newly invented herbicides to get rid of weeds in the 1980s and 1990s, the “Grab-a-hoe” jobs disappeared altogether.

By the 1980s, 3,000 status Cree and at least 2,000 Métis harvested sugar beets in southern Alberta.

Meanwhile, Cree men and women had started working potato harvests in the late 1960s. Sugar beet farmers needed large amounts of labour during the growing months but just a few drivers at harvest. Potatoes needed little work in the growing season but massive reserve labour for harvest, especially for grading. The Cree first worked for the same Japanese-Canadians who had come as involuntary labour from BC for sugar beet farms in Alberta during the war. Many of those Japanese families had had market gardens in BC, and by the 1950s started to buy small plots to grow vegetables for market in southern Alberta. When the Japanese introduced methods of flood irrigation using now available water from the South Saskatchewan, they showed that money could be made in growing potatoes. And when they bought more land, and their machines could harvest four or eight or sixteen rows instead of two, and farms became too big to run with family labour, these early Japanese farmers had access to an army of reserve labour already available: the Cree workers from the sugar beet fields.

Japanese-Canadian farmer Mas Nishima, 88, of Taber, tells me that without the Cree workers, many farmers would have had to plow their crops under. “They saved my farm and a lot of other farms in southern Alberta,” he says.

With all the elements for success—the know-how, the sun, the soil, the water and the cheap, available temporary labour—the potato sector exploded. New processing plants followed. Then came Dutch-Canadian farmers from Ontario with money to buy land and equipment and go bigger. Many of them had no history working with Cree people, no memory of them, no special ties like friendship.

Clem explains that in the early days, there were only Cree people working sugar beets and potato harvests, on every farm. “What you see here today, the Mennonites, that was all us back in the day, men and women,” he says. “Then we got pushed out. The Mexican Mennonites worked cheaper.”

In the pre-dawn chill, Mennonite women grade potatoes on the conveyor

Just as importantly, according to Laliberté, after those Mennonite families settled permanently in southern Alberta, they became more immediately available than the Cree from northern Saskatchewan. Cree families would come back the next season and go farm-to-farm looking for work, only to find their old jobs had already been given away. And some farmers, and Cree people themselves, would say that Mennonite workers did not have the same problems with alcohol that made some Cree workers—most of them survivors of residential schools—“unreliable,” especially after a few weeks of hard labour, long hours, no rest and bad living quarters, often just abandoned chicken coops or cow sheds. Mark Miyanaga, co-owner of Triple M Farms near Taber, later tells me that despite any problems a small number of Cree workers did have with alcohol at times, they were as a whole as reliable and hard-working as anyone.

Laliberté says that remarkably, however, he never heard of any conflict between the Cree and the Mennonites or other people who replaced them. Clem confirms this: “Our people are good to get along with,” he says. “Whatever happens, happens.”

Elmer and Dwayne know of only two more crews of Cree men in the area. Cousin Emil is working on one nearer to Bow Island, and cousin Brian is working on a Japanese-owned farm near Taber. “Brian says that farm is going to be hiring ‘Mexican Mexicans,’ next year,” Dwayne says, using air-quotes. “Real Mexicans.”

“So, this might be the last year they hire any Cree people,” he says.

“Yeah, but we’ll still be around,” Clem says, jutting his jaw a little more. “Just maybe not here.”

I check in with Elmer throughout the following week. He never slacks off in the work. But on the next Thursday night, after nearly two weeks of standing on his feet backing trucks in, 15 hours a day, his ankles swell to the size of his knees. The pain keeps him awake all night. On the Friday morning, the swelling is too much for him to put his boots on. “I wanted to stay until the end,” he tells me. He will drive the 700 kilometres home alone that day, bringing the number of the last crew down to three.

Virgil Grandfield is grateful to Lloyd Ypma for letting him camp at his farm and document the work of Dwayne’s crew.

Text and photos by Virgil Grandfield

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The post The Last Crew appeared first on Alberta Views.

Danielle Smith’s party has a certain record in its dealings with workers. During the United Conservative Party’s first term in government, Alberta’s minimum wage for teenagers was cut from $15 to $13. The minimum wage for adults remained at $15, even in the inflationary years that followed the COVID-19 pandemic. Compensation benefits for injured workers were cut by half a billion dollars over five years. The UCP changed the rules on overtime to give employers extra leverage over workers and decrease the need to pay out time and a half. The then-finance minister, Travis Toews, asked members of the United Nurses of Alberta to accept 3 per cent salary rollbacks in July 2021. Similar wage rollbacks were proposed for homecare aides, licensed practical nurses and other members of the AUPE.

“2024 is payback time,” says Guy Smith with a smile. Approximately 82,000 of the AUPE’s 95,000 members will need their job contracts renegotiated in 2024—that’s 65 per cent of the total membership—and Smith is bullish on the union’s prospects. “They [the workers] were on the front lines, struggling with short-staffing issues, mental health issues, inflationary issues. I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess as to what our demands will actually be, but they’ll probably be significant.”

Whether the new premier will be any friendlier to organized labour than the previous one is an open question, but Guy Smith vs. Premier Smith will be one of the major narratives of the UCP’s second term.

The AUPE’s members are involved in a wide range of services that are vital to Alberta life. They’re responsible for government administration and policy design and implementation; some are firefighters; some are museum staff, correctional workers or social workers. The interpretive guide at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is an AUPE member.

The pandemic may have subsided, but the struggles of the post–pandemic era are no less challenging for AUPE’s members. These challenges are in three main categories: the increasing cost of living, the privatization of work places, and the condition of perpetually “working short,” with insufficient staff to manage workloads.

Consider the day-to-day reality faced by Samantha Samborski, employed as an individual support worker at a residential homecare facility in Edmonton. She cares for children with severe disabilities who depend on her and her co-workers for almost all of their basic needs. As she explains it, children come to the facility “because of car accidents, or some have just had other accidents happen to them in the early stages of life. And we’ve also had children that have tried to commit suicide. So we see a wide variety of the emotional side of humanity.”

The job has become a lot harder in recent years. “The benefits and pay have not kept up with the realities of today’s world and the inflation crisis,” says Samborski. “More and more workers take second jobs or rely on overtime to make ends meet. And since the pandemic, it’s only highlighted the lack of respect that so many of us feel. We are expected to do more with less.”

Many of Alberta’s public workers feel disrespected: “We’re being expected to do more with less.”

In addition to her work duties Samborski is the chair of AUPE Local 009, which has roughly 600 members. When she started with the local eight years ago, it had over a thousand members. The decline is mostly due to privatization. Facilities close down and reopen as non-profits or private agencies, or they close down permanently. This impacts unionized staff, who often have to go work in the non-profit or private sector, often for less money. Samborski says the facility she works at in Edmonton is at risk of one day closing because it has been ordered to not take in any new patients except under exceptional circumstances. In the summer of 2020, staff were told by email that the government had “alternative service delivery models” for this home and similar residential facilities in the province. As of August 2023, the home was still open and in public ownership.

Samborski is one of the 82,000 AUPE members whose contract is up for renegotiation in 2024. The legal context for collective bargaining has changed in recent years, in part because of the essential services legislation the NDP government brought in to keep the province compliant with a Supreme Court decision. This legislation requires locals such as Samborski’s to have an essential services agreement in place to determine what services will be offered in the event of a strike. No strike action can be taken without such an agreement.

LEFT: Smith in London’s Trafalgar Square, circa 1987, after a rally opposing apartheid. TOP: Smith at a protest against Klein-era cuts, circa 1994, with mentor Linda Karpowich, former AUPE local 006 chair and Alberta Federation of Labour president. BOTTOM: Protesting cuts at Yellowhead Youth Centre, circa 1992; at right is then-social services minister Mike Cardinal.

Aside from the legal considerations, the AUPE is up against an old ideological nemesis: the UCP has given no sign of abandoning its preference for private over public delivery of services. The mandate letter of July 18, 2023, to incoming Health Minister Adriana LaGrange, for example, called for “supporting primary care as the foundation of our healthcare system by assessing alternative models of care and leveraging all healthcare professionals.” While vague, “alternative models” can easily be interpreted as quietly encouraging more privatization.

It’s a trend Guy Smith has seen before, in particular during the premiership of Ralph Klein. “We saw the privatization of entire departments. Transportation, road-clearing and all the infrastructure for government registries,” he says. In the early to mid-1990s, the AUPE’s membership declined from 50,000 to 34,000. The union teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. Former president Carol Anne Dean, elected in 1993, recounted her memory of those years for the AUPE’s 40th anniversary magazine. “It was like bombs were going off everywhere, every day, all the time,” she said.

Smith has participated for long enough in the AUPE, right back to his time with Local 006, that he has an intuitive feeling for the ebb and flow of the Alberta labour movement’s fortunes and how each moment requires its own strategy. When he was a care worker at the Yellowhead Youth Centre in Edmonton, he participated in a 1990 strike that the AUPE had neither sanctioned nor sought to prevent. Media coverage of the strike was extensive, and at least one video from CFRN News is still available online for those wanting to view it. Six managers tried to do the job of 100 striking workers. It did not go well. Anywhere from 16 to 40 youth ran away, and the police had to make multiple arrests. “All hell’s broken loose,” a resident told CFRN News during the strike. Smith and his fellow union members tried to encourage orderliness among the youth, but the relationship between troubled teens and their temporary caregivers, the managers, was so fractious as to be unworkable.

It was a defining moment in Smith’s career. “I built that worksite from an inactive worksite into one that led a strike, and it was thanks to these trusting, supportive relationships as workers,” he remembers. “We were sticking up and standing next to each other when we needed to.… It taught me a lot about other people’s resilience.”

Smith is the son of a barrister and a feminist. His mother, Mair Smith, helped create the Alberta Status of Women Action Committee, of which Helena Freeland, mother of the current deputy minister of Canada, was also a member. From his mother, Smith learned to fight for his beliefs. From his father, he learned different lessons. “I always respected my dad’s judiciousness. Yet the way he treated people was very kind, gentle and fair.”

LEFT: Smith has performed labour songs at many rallies; here, he’s at a 1999 protest to oppose Premier Klein’s plans to privatize healthcare. RIGHT: Addressing AUPE’s annual convention in 2022. Smith: “Society needs to be built on co-operation and collaboration–yet the friction within the various parts of society has to continue. That’s how society move forward.”

The way Smith approaches his job has also been shaped by geography and culture. His wife, Sherry, is from a family of settlers, her parents and grandparents having come to Alberta from Ukraine and Denmark. Smith met Sherry in Grande Prairie and their roots in the town run deep. “I do have a very deep fondness for the kind of community you find in a smaller town,” says Smith.

As anyone who has listened to Smith speaking for more than a few seconds will know, his own family roots are quite different. He was born in St. Chad’s Hospital in the central England city of Birmingham. From there his family moved to Sidcup in Kent before making the big decision to emigrate to Canada. Smith first landed with his parents and sister in Edmonton in 1973. “Then we took the Greyhound bus from Edmonton to Grande Prairie. Six hours! And I thought, ‘Where are we going?’ Because when you go on a six-hour coach ride in the UK, you go through hundreds of villages and towns and cities. So what took me was the vastness, the space.”

He remembers Grande Prairie as a very welcoming community. His parents became well integrated into the community, his father working as a provincial court judge, while both of them also maintained active hobbies—Smith’s mother loving crafts and pottery, his father involved in amateur theatre. In England Smith had been among the last to be picked for the soccer team and had to stay out of the way in the back, chiefly to avoid mistakes. In Canada he was given more exposure to the game and became a better player, which he describes as very positive for his confidence. In 1977 his parents divorced, and Smith moved with his mother and sister to Edmonton. He would have been 15—for many people, the years of teenage rebellion, but he provides no indication of responding with angst or anger to the divorce or to being uprooted again.

His education and career followed a smooth path. After high school, he attended the University of Alberta, earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology and got a job at the Yellowhead Youth Centre in 1983. “I didn’t think much about anything except earning a paycheque and having fun and playing music… and really enjoying my job as a youth worker.” Sherry was at that time a schoolteacher.

They both quit their jobs to go live in England for a while. It’s clear there was a wanderlust, especially in Sherry, that had to be satiated, even if it meant living with very little money. It is this chapter of Smith’s life that appears to have galvanized his worker sympathies. In London he became involved in the Militant Tendency, one of the most radical factions of the 1980s Labour Party. He went doorknocking for a Militant candidate in Tower Hamlets, an old working-class neighbourhood of London’s East End, where socialist ideas were not at all new. There was a strong tradition of union militancy in the area.

Some 82,000 AUPE members will need to renegotiate their job contracts in 2024.

“I was intrigued by their outlook of building a socialist society run by workers, redistribution of wealth and common ownership of the means of production, and all that,” he says.

The Militant Tendency suffered a very public defeat as Labour purged its ranks of the faction’s most outspoken and active members. A critical turning point came in 1985—and it serves as an interesting test case for how Smith views his leadership responsibilities in balance with his idealism and radicalism. Militant was at that time in control of Liverpool’s city council and in a prolonged fight with Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, which had imposed austerity measures. Under Militant, Liverpool ran an illegal deficit budget to continue spending on social programs. But as money ran out, city councillors hired taxis to go around handing out redundancy notices to city staff, convinced that overseas loans could eventually be secured to hire them back.

The then-Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, mocked this “grotesque chaos” in a speech delivered to hundreds of attendees of the party conference at Bournemouth, and the purge of Militant proceeded in ruthless style.

“I think the Liverpool experience actually shows that when there are worker collectives run very much from a grassroots perspective, established institutions are threatened,” Smith says. “However, I do recognize and understand the need for consistent governance, for consistent decisions as much as possible, and for risk mitigation, transparency and accountability… AUPE members need stability in the organization that supports them. Sometimes I’ve had to dial back on my principles for the greater good, and sometimes I’ve had to push those principles for the greater good as well.”

Guy Smith believes that when unions win concessions for workers, all Albertans benefit.

Smith likes the analogy of a chess game for how labour strategy can play out. In the upcoming contract negotiations for 82,000 of the AUPE’s members, Premier Smith will be the chief opponent. “Society needs to be built on co-operation and collaboration, yet, to a degree, the friction within the various parts of society has to continue—that’s how society moves forward,” he says.

He doesn’t believe that Alberta’s NDP, typically seen as an ally of organized labour, has always played the chess game particularly well. Considering Rachel Notley’s four years as premier, Smith says he saw some clear errors of judgment, using as an example the passing of Bill 6, the Enhanced Protection for Farm and Ranch Workers Act. “I think there was some naïveté there,” says Smith. He interprets the fierce resistance to the legislation as a sign that the NDP had misread the mood of rural Alberta.

“What happened over time is that they [the NDP] started getting very insular,” he says. “I didn’t have my first real face-to-face meeting with Premier Notley, even though I’d been asking for one, until three years into her mandate.” He thinks the NDP’s subsequent time as the Official Opposition (2019–) has strengthened the party, and that it’s now time for the NDP to give Albertans something to fight for, not merely against. That’s what the AUPE plans on doing,

While the re-election of a staunchly conservative government last spring might seem to indicate a return to traditional Alberta politics, Smith makes no assumptions about how the next few years will play out. “I think we know the premier has certain beliefs and a direction, but it depends on how the government operates. A good number of new MLAs have come in with new ideas and new backgrounds.”

The cost-of-living crisis has raised the stakes considerably. Mary Jane Fisher has been a licensed practical nurse for over 12 years, usually employed by Alberta Health Services. She is the chair of AUPE Local 045, lives in Okotoks and has a job at a homecare facility in High River. She and her husband renegotiated their mortgage in early 2023, and their monthly payments jumped by $900. “I’m one of the lucky ones,” she says. “My kids are grown up. They’ve left the house. If my kids were still little, in school, $900 a month would have absolutely broken us to the point where we would lose our home. So much for savings, retirement income—anything like that’s completely gone out the window. We’re just barely scraping by.”

Fisher is not alone in her struggles. She says morale among her fellow healthcare workers is low. The repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic are still felt acutely. “You feel like you’re a healthcare hero, and then you go to feeling like you’re a zero when you’re not getting the recognition and the respect that you deserve.”

Like many other leaders in the AUPE, Fisher is deeply concerned about privatization. She describes a new practice called “client-directed homecare.” Under this model, if a client qualifies for homecare but the local facility cannot meet the needs (typically because of staff shortages), the government provides funds through Alberta Blue Cross for the client to hire their own private caregivers. According to Fisher, under such arrangements, the wages paid to the caregivers—those actually providing the frontline services—can sometimes be as low as the minimum wage.

Private homecare is already widespread in Edmonton and Calgary. Now, Fisher says, the risk of privatization is coming to rural Alberta. “In rural Alberta,” she explains, “we’re still lucky that we have in-house healthcare aides. That provides way better streamlined services, because nurses and healthcare aides are all in one office. So our healthcare aides know our nurses, they know exactly what they need to be doing with their clients, and it’s way better.”

Guy Smith believes unions can continue to make progress and win concessions for workers in Alberta, and by extension create benefits for all Albertans. He’s seen evidence of it during his entire career and in all parts of the province, including rural Alberta. He’s seen enthusiastic support for workers on picket lines. “Big trucks—people who may work in the resource sector—they’re honking and waving and dropping off coffee because they actually understand
that sort of David-and-Goliath kind of struggle,” he says.

If the past tells us anything, Smith says, it’s to never count out the AUPE. From near-bankruptcy and rapidly declining membership in 1995 to full coffers and 95,000 members as of 2023, President Smith says he’s ready to take on Premier Smith. “At the end of the day, we have ourselves to rely on, and that’s it,” he says. He’s not smiling.

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

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The post Smith Vs. Smith appeared first on Alberta Views.

In the end Alberta achieved very modest job growth during Kenney’s time, roughly the same as comparable jurisdictions. The more notable outcome—and I’d argue the UCP’s actual agenda all along—has been a significant shift in wealth from workers to employers by cheapening labour. Alberta may have slightly more jobs now than when the UCP took office, but it also has more jobs that are worse: that pay less, to workers with fewer rights, toiling under worse conditions.

Illustration by Gerry Rasmussen

Kenney began his attack on worker rights by targeting teenagers. In June 2019 the UCP cut the minimum wage for most workers under 18 from $15 an hour to $13. Kenney’s rationale was that a lower minimum wage would mean more jobs. “Thirteen dollars an hour is a heck of a lot more than zero bucks an hour, and that’s the option here,” he said. There was (and still is) no evidence that lowering wages creates employment for youth. The only indisputable outcome was more money in the pockets of low-wage employers and less for students, many of whom were saving to afford rapidly rising post-secondary tuitions prompted by government funding cuts.

The UCP also left the regular minimum wage to languish at $15 an hour during Kenney’s time in office, despite the cost of living rising over that period by about 8 per cent. Some 300,000 workers, mostly adult women who have permanent and long-term jobs with large companies, bore the costs of this policy, while the beneficiaries were, again, low-wage employers.

Kenney also took a run at injured workers, reducing their workers’ compensation benefits by half a billion dollars over five years. This included capping wage-loss benefits and de-indexing them from the cost of living, removing an employer’s obligation to rehire injured workers, and radically reducing the likelihood of workers receiving compensation for psychological conditions such as PTSD.

According to one-time UCP labour minister Jason Copping, employers told him that “rising costs” put the Workers’ Compensation Board’s (WCB’s) “future state of sustainability in doubt.” If this is what employers told Copping, it is simply untrue. In 2020 Alberta’s accident fund was fully funded, with $13.7-billion in assets. Indeed, there has been so much excess cash in the accident fund that the WCB has since 2018 subsidized employer premiums by over $1-billion.

A different way to control workers’ compensation costs would be to reduce the number of workplace injuries. In late 2020 Copping introduced significant changes to Alberta occupational health and safety (OHS) rules, which he framed as “improving safety for Alberta workers and making workplaces safer.” In reality these changes gutted the powers of workplace health and safety committees to make workplaces safer—including eliminating the requirement for regular inspections—and made it harder for workers to refuse unsafe work.

Michael Hughes, a spokesperson for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401, told the Edmonton Journal that the right to refuse unsafe work was key to workers protecting themselves during massive COVID outbreaks at the Cargill and JBS meatpacking plants. “We feel it may have actually saved people’s lives.” He said the Kenney government was reckless to weaken that right.

At the same time, the government cut enforcement. In the UCP era the number of compliance orders written by OHS inspectors to employers, directing them to remedy unsafe work, fell by 49.6 per cent, while the number of tickets written for violations dropped by 93.4 per cent. Charges laid against employers and fines levied also declined. Not surprisingly, laxer rules and phantasmal enforcement resulted in the number of serious injuries rising by 16 per cent during Kenney’s tenure.

Finally, the UCP made changes to Alberta’s rules about overtime that allow employers to impose so-called agreements on the averaging of weekly work hours. These “agreements” allow employers to delay the payment of overtime premiums. Minister Copping nonsensically framed these changes as “expanding choice for workers” when in fact the choice of whether or not to pay overtime is granted solely to employers.

The upshot of the UCP’s overtime changes is that employers can require employees to work up to 208 overtime hours per year (roughly five weeks of additional work) without having to pay any overtime premiums. Given that an estimated $3.3-billion in overtime was paid in 2018, the UCP’s changes transferred untold hundreds of millions of dollars from workers to their bosses.

These changes affected a broad swath of Albertans. But Kenney and the UCP particularly targeted public-sector workers. This began in June of 2019, when the UCP legislatively delayed wage-increase arbitrations (affecting 180,000 workers) that had been negotiated with the former NDP government. Public-sector workers—mostly women—and their unions had viewed the arbitrations as a quid pro quo for agreeing to a two-year wage freeze (2017–2019) and saw the delay as a betrayal. During the legislative debate over this bill, Kenney handed out bright-pink earplugs to his caucus. This juvenile behaviour set the tone for the years that followed.

The government rationalized the delay to give it time to get a handle on the province’s finances, which it characterized as “worse than expected.” The UCP’s assertion that the province’s coffers were bare did not, however, stop it from handing business owners approximately $4.5-billion in tax cuts over four years (tax cuts that did not result in meaningful job growth). In the interim the Kenney government set out to justify draconian legislative changes that would drive deep cuts to public-sector wages.

In September 2019 Kenney’s hand-picked panel on Alberta’s finances recommended cutting public-sector spending. It urged the government to erode the wages and benefits of workers who deliver public services (including doctors), either at the bargaining table or through legislation. The UCP wasted no time in complying and, before the year was out, passed the Ensuring Fiscal Sustainability Act, 2019. Tucked at the back of this omnibus bill was the Public Sector Employers Act, whereby the government gave itself the authority to impose a bargaining mandate on all public-sector employers, such as school boards, post-secondary institutions and Alberta Health Services. Employers were furthermore required keep their mandate a secret from the unions during bargaining, and the government gave itself a veto over any settlement that strayed from the mandate.

Illustration by Gerry Rasmussen.

Critics predicted these mandates would make collective bargaining a hollow and fettered process. Unions would go through the motions of bargaining with the employer at the table. Meanwhile, the real decisions would be made by the government in the back room, safely insulated from any consequences. This analysis turned out to be spot on.

The omnibus bill also gave the UCP the power to unilaterally cancel its province-wide agreement on physician compensation, which it did in February 2020. This move was unprecedented in this province; the Alberta Medical Association called it “outrageous.” The government then imposed a new agreement containing significant rollbacks in physician fees and other rights. Physicians were furious, and backlash from doctors and the public alike resulted in the government partially reversing course. After two years of bargaining (including a tentative settlement that was rejected by doctors in 2021), a new agreement was ratified in September 2022 with a below-inflation increase in compensation. In the interim, many doctors left the province, and many Albertans, particularly outside Edmonton and Calgary, faced difficulty accessing family MDs or specialists.

Finally, before going to the table with virtually every unionized public-sector worker in the province, the UCP also made significant changes to Alberta’s labour laws. The Restoring Balance in Alberta’s Workplaces Act was passed in the summer of 2020. In addition to making it easier for employers to thwart workers’ efforts to unionize (under the predictably misleading assertion that the UCP was “restoring workplace democracy”), this Act severely restricted picketing activities during a strike or lockout.

When collective bargaining reaches an impasse, workers can go on strike. The purpose of a strike is to apply economic pressure on an employer to agree to contract provisions that workers also can accept. Workers do so by withholding their labour (which disrupts operations) as well as by picketing. Picketing lets workers dissuade potential customers from doing business with a struck employer. Picketing can also stop or delay traffic into and out of a workplace, which makes it more difficult for the employer to carry on operations. The UCP altered Alberta’s Labour Relations Code to prohibit strikers from obstructing or impeding anyone who wishes to cross a picket line.

Workers sometimes also engage in what is known as secondary picketing in front of businesses owned by their employer’s customers or suppliers or in a public space. The UCP’s changes now require picketers to receive prior permission from the Labour Board to picket anywhere but at their regular place of work. And the UCP’s Critical Infrastructure Defence Act gives the government the power to prohibit picketing in certain public places, including sidewalks, boulevards and roadways.

“These new rules have rendered legal picketing ineffective and effective picketing illegal,” said Susan Cake, assistant professor of human resources and labour relations at Athabasca University. “This has tipped the playing field significantly towards employers, including the government, the largest employer of unionized workers in Alberta.” While the labour movement promised fierce resistance to picketing changes, it launched no legal challenge with any legs. Unions and their members have clearly been reluctant to violate UCP government laws, because of the significant and immediate consequences attached to doing so combined with the delay and uncertain outcome of court challenges.

The UCP’s Restoring Balance in Alberta’s Workplaces Act also interfered with unions’ ability to collect dues. Normally, unions present budgets to their members to vote on each year. Once a budget is passed, every member must pay the union dues required, to fund union activities. The UCP now requires unions to separate out the cost of “core” union functions (e.g., negotiations, handling grievances and educating members) from “political activities and other causes.” Union members are only required to pay the portion of dues devoted to core activities. Unions must get each member to annually opt-in for non-core activities.

According to Kenney, this time-consuming process means “no longer will union workers be forced to fund political campaigns of union bosses!” But the real reason Kenney wanted to interfere in internal union governance, according to United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401 president Tom Hesse, was “to be disruptive, to foment dissent and to encumber unions so they can’t operate.” One knock-on effect of Kenney’s meddling is that unions are reducing their support to charities, community organizations and disaster-relief agencies in order to avoid the hassle of getting members to opt-in. A 2022 Parkland Institute study suggests this will entail a $6-million hit to Alberta communities.

When “bargaining” with major public-sector unions in core government services (e.g., education, healthcare, post-secondary) began in 2020, employers initially proposed wage cuts of 3 per cent to 4 per cent, followed by several years of wage freezes and other sector-specific benefit rollbacks. This pattern clearly demonstrated the government mandates at work behind the scenes. Union leaders began preparing and mobilizing members for strike action, and in October 2020 thousands of AUPE healthcare workers engaged in a one-day wildcat strike to express opposition to the government’s plans to privatize 11,000 healthcare jobs.

As contracts began to be settled in late 2021 and 2022, public-sector workers achieved modest wage increases ranging from 2.75 per cent to 4.25 per cent over four years. While better than initially expected, these settlements continued to fall far behind inflation. And given the demands placed on public-sector workers during the first years of the COVID pandemic, these miserly increases were also deeply insulting.

Post-secondary employers, facing government budget cuts and the government’s secret mandate, were particularly aggressive during bargaining. Faculty at Concordia University of Edmonton, a private university that receives significant public funding, struck in early 2022, and a five-week strike followed at the University of Lethbridge. The Lethbridge strike ended with an agreement that followed the provincial pattern. The employer’s unreasonable behaviour during the strike provided more evidence that the government, not the board of governors, was calling the shots at the bargaining table.

Much of the shift in the government’s demands between 2020 and 2022 can be attributed to the impacts of the pandemic. But even as the crisis revealed the importance and scarcity of healthcare workers, the UCP continued to do less than other provinces to support healthcare workers, including refusing to provide bonus pay to nurses. Alberta’s suddenly improved fiscal situation due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rising oil prices also took away much of the excuse for imposing drastic austerity.

The UCP’s agenda has been to shift wealth from workers to employers.

The mistreatment of public-sector workers did not end at the bargaining table. The UCP pursued numerous “work-intensification” efforts in healthcare. In the fall of 2020, for example, it announced its plan to lay off 11,000 support staff in cleaning, food, laundry and protective services at AHS. In July 2022 all community lab services were handed to DynaLIFE Medical Labs, which move cost another several hundred public employees their jobs.

Kenney also cut funding to Alberta school boards, resulting in approximately 25,000 education workers and education assistants being laid off in early 2020. These layoffs, amounting to approximately 1 per cent of Alberta’s entire workforce, were announced via Twitter on a weekend, only days after Education Minister Adriana LaGrange had said school boards would see no funding cuts. LaGrange later said this was a temporary layoff in response to COVID school closures, and that funding would be restored once in-person classes resumed. Later she said 2,000 of those jobs would never return.

Teachers also saw the UCP hand the management of their pension fund over to the government-controlled Alberta Investment Management Corporation, despite AIMCo’s history of questionable investment decisions and poor returns. Teachers had to go to court to regain control over their pensions.

The UCP government also made drastic cuts to the post-secondary system, including slashing funding to the University of Alberta by 33 per cent between 2019 and 2022. The U of A responded by firing more than 1,100 people (mostly support staff) and hiking tuition by more than 20 per cent.

The government’s unwillingness to address the airborne transmission of COVID through meaningful public health measures means public-sector workers must now perform their jobs in unsafe workplaces. As of September 2022, Alberta’s WCB had accepted 22,478 time-loss claims for COVID, the vast majority of them from municipal, healthcare and education workers. This figure actually undercounts cases in education, because most Alberta teachers are excluded from the ambit of workers’ compensation.

Working very hard in unnecessarily dangerous workplaces for stagnant wages and declining job security is a recipe for burnout and attrition. The government’s refusal to allow school boards to require classroom masking (which directive led to high rates of illness and absenteeism) and its insistence on imposing a curriculum that is poorly designed (e.g., “find gravity on a globe”), age-inappropriate, plagiarized and often outright racist is demoralizing and exhausting.

In January 2022, 37 per cent of teachers said they soon planned to leave the profession or the province due to stress, exhaustion and anxiety. Long-time Alberta public school teacher and principal Sue Bell told reporters she retired early because of a lack of government support for teachers during the pandemic. “I would have worked for a few years more, but the last year-and-a-half just burnt me out. I was done.”

Burnout and illness among nurses are also routinely creating staff shortages, delays for patients awaiting surgeries and other medical treatments, and the periodic closure of rural emergency services. Not surprisingly, healthcare jobs now often go unfilled and other provinces are aggressively recruiting Alberta nurses. Heather Smith, long-time president of the United Nurses of Alberta, told CBC that her members “are just not prepared to deal with the kind of disrespect they’re feeling here in the province. They want workplaces that respect them and value [their] contributions… And they’re quite prepared to do it in other locations.”

Calgary emergency-room physician J. Edward Les wrote in the Calgary Herald about the long-term impact of the government’s treatment of doctors. “Physicians are running harder and harder to keep up, and in return they’re gifted with constant disrespect from governments and growing abuse from frustrated patients. It’s no mystery why family doctors are leaving in droves, and why we can’t attract enough new ones. The real mystery, perhaps, is why there are any good family physicians left at all.”

Things look no better under Kenney’s successor, Danielle Smith, who has asserted without evidence that staffing shortages have been manufactured by AHS. She has also mused about specifically recruiting unvaccinated healthcare workers. The value of hiring healthcare workers who are skeptical of basic infection-control protocols is hard to fathom.

Illustration by Gerry Rasmussen.

One of the most alarming outcomes of the UCP’s sustained attack on workers is the possibility that the morale and trust of many workers has been irrevocably damaged. This is especially bad in the public sector, as such damage can compromise the functioning of basic public services—doctor availability, ambulance response times, surgery wait times, high-school graduation rates, even worsening math proficiency.

In my experience, public-sector workers are used to recurring bouts of difficult working conditions. For the most part, they just persevere. This reflects that they have deeply held commitments to their students or patients, to their co-workers, to their sense of professional duty and belief in the value of publicly delivered services. It also reflects that they have invested in their careers and communities. Most public-sector workers can see that the cyclical nature of the work means better times will return. Rarely are working conditions so bad that leaving a public-sector job, the profession or the province is worth the cost.

But profoundly bad and worsening conditions with no prospects for improvement can shift this calculus. At some point a further harm or indignity, however small, can cause a worker to throw in the towel. Once a worker makes this decision, it’s very hard to get them to re-engage. This is because fixing the problem isn’t just a matter of the employer walking back that last bad thing it did. Rather, it has to fix the whole range of issues that led to this moment. Few employers or politicians are prepared to repudiate their entire agenda.

When a worker actually quits and moves on (rather than just quietly giving up), they’re unlikely to return. Potential replacements, having heard through the social media grapevine just how rotten things are in Alberta, can be tough to recruit. Only people with no better options would take a public-sector job in Alberta, given how badly the UCP treated their predecessors. This bodes ill for all Albertans, who would receive worse service, often in our most vulnerable moments. And it represents a damning indictment of the UCP government.

Bob Barnetson is a professor of labour relations at Athabasca. His most recent research is a chapter in Anger and Angst: Jason Kenney’s Legacy and Alberta’s Right (Black Rose, 2023).

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The post To the Breaking Point appeared first on Alberta Views.

Today is different. We’re standing beside University Drive, barred from the campus because we’re on strike. The word “strike” seems strange to me, alien to my role as a professor. I look around at my colleagues. Some are carrying placards reading “Fair wages for teaching!” and “Fair workloads.” Others are huddled over warm coffee and waving at passing vehicles.

How did it come to this?

That’s a good question, the answer to which goes back a few years and leads to some even bigger questions about the future of post-secondary education in Alberta.

Students supporting U of L faculty, March 11, 2022. Students wanted to go back to class, but they were also concerned about the direction the university was taking. For years they’d seen classes get larger, courses get cancelled and full-time faculty disappear. Photo: University of Lethbridge Faculty Association.

I started work at the University of Lethbridge in summer 2002. I had spent nearly a decade as a sessional instructor at the University of Alberta. I was, as is said, “long in the tooth,” even by the standard of most late-starting academics. Despite four published books and a teaching award, I was on the verge of leaving the profession. The insecurity of term-to-term contracts and low wages, with no benefits, made it difficult to raise a family, let alone continue to do research. Getting a position at Lethbridge saved my career.

My first few years at the U of L were a huge blessing. I taught a regular bank of courses. I supervised graduate students and taught independent and applied studies courses to individual students. I researched, wrote and gave public talks on various public issues. I worked with smart and engaging colleagues. My family and I became part of a growing community, involved in the arts, recreation and public affairs.

The drastic cuts of the early Klein years were in the rearview mirror. Alberta’s post-secondary sector in the early 2000s was growing to meet the needs of a young and expanding population. Undergraduate student numbers at the U of L increased and graduate programs grew. Our school was becoming a nationally recognized and respected institution for its teaching and research alike.

But things began to change. As always, the province’s finances were over-reliant on resource royalties. No government was willing to deal with the instabilities of boom and bust and the problems it created for public institutions. When the bust hit—as it did from 2014 to 2021—public services, including the post-secondary sector, felt the blow.

In the downturn’s early years, staff at Alberta’s post-secondary institutions, including the University of Lethbridge, accepted that there would be no increases to our pay. One year, we went without an expected cost-of-living bonus. Faculty knew we had a part to play in weathering the fiscal storm. Still, we also believed the provincial government valued faculty and our role not simply to train but to educate students to be critical thinkers and participatory citizens. Further, we believed our voices on decisions affecting the post-secondary system were being heard.

These beliefs vanished after the United Conservative Party’s victory in 2019. Elected on a platform of severe austerity, the new government showed itself fundamentally opposed to the notion of public services. One of its first acts was to commission a report into Alberta’s finances, with its findings already predetermined. The MacKinnon Report was intended to set the stage for cuts, and it dutifully argued that Alberta’s public sector workers were overpaid. But the report also ignored—because it was told to ignore—Alberta Treasury Board data showing the province’s fiscal difficulties are the result of low tax revenues, not high expenditures.

The MacKinnon Report was followed by a full-frontal assault on the post-secondary sector in the form of cuts. The operating budgets for Alberta post-secondary institutions shrank by 18.8 per cent between 2018/2019 and 2022/2023, or by $4.6-billion. The University of Lethbridge’s operating budget has been cut by 21 per cent since 2019/2020.

This was followed by Advanced Education’s release of Alberta 2030. That document lays out a 10-year plan for turning local post-secondary institutions into little more than skills-training centres, at the behest of business, and evaluating their performance based on numbers related to graduates’ employment—e.g., an institution would get more public money the higher its graduates’ incomes. The same document makes clear the government’s intention to steadily withdraw responsibility for funding post-secondary, forcing institutions to rely more on marketizing their research and raising tuition. It also portends a drastic transition from full-time faculty towards “just-in-time” teachers—low paid and replaceable sessionals—and a lessening of faculty input into program development and delivery.

As contract negotiations began at the University of Lethbridge in 2019/20, faculty were further angered by Kafka-esque ministerial directives given by government to boards of all post-secondary institutions. We knew the directives existed; the boards told us. But their precise details about wage limits were hidden and still remain so. Our faculty association was left attempting to bargain in a landscape whose boundaries were never clear.

By early 2022, grievances at Alberta’s post-secondary institutions were at a boiling point. On January 4 Edmonton’s private Concordia University went on strike. It lasted 11 days. Mount Royal University narrowly averted a strike through an agreement in principle on February 14. On April 4 Athabasca University faculty voted strongly in favour of striking, were locked out by administration, and reached a tentative settlement three days later. Today, labour relations continue to simmer at Alberta’s two largest universities in Calgary and Edmonton.

Sandwiched between these events, faculty at the University of Lethbridge walked out on February 10.

This was the first legal strike at a public university in Alberta.

The decision to strike is never an easy one, but it’s perhaps particularly hard for academics. We’d much rather be teaching, meeting with students or continuing research that in some cases we’ve been conducting for decades. But also, the idea of engaging in labour conflict is anathema to many faculty. This was especially true at the University of Lethbridge when I arrived there 20 years ago. It was a “small c” conservative place in a “big C” conservative region of the province. Today, despite the two-term electoral success of NDP MLA Shannon Phillips, whose riding encompasses the main campus, Lethbridge’s culture remains largely inhospitable to union activism, especially by academics, whom many Albertans view as overpaid and doing work that’s obscure or unnecessary. And yet, here we are. The strike vote held in early February was approved by an astonishing 92 per cent of all faculty members.

As the strike began, faculty had been without a contract for more than 600 days. To say negotiations between the two sides had not gone well would be an understatement; more precisely, they hadn’t gone anywhere. Every effort on the part of faculty to negotiate a fair agreement—one that also included many non-monetary issues such as workload and the recognition of instructors’ research and service in yearly evaluations—had been rebuffed. The board’s response had been to stonewall or say “there’s nothing to negotiate.”

We were a varied group of picketers: an assortment of faculty types, including sessional and term instructors, academic assistants, professional librarians and professors, and people of all shapes and sizes, genders, backgrounds and ages. We took up positions at three entrances to Lethbridge’s main west side campus. I was at site #1, the main entrance. Others picketed a small downtown branch, and still others the university’s Calgary campus. A mood of optimism set in—surely the strike would end quickly.

This was a new experience for all of us. Indeed, it was the first-ever legal strike at a public university in Alberta. Before 2017, academic staff in this province had been prohibited by law from striking. As our strike began, some politicians and U of L administrators blamed the previous NDP government for instituting a union-friendly law, but this was inaccurate. The legislative change had resulted from a Supreme Court ruling, dealing with Saskatchewan, that in turn made Alberta’s existing anti-strike law unconstitutional. Alberta’s NDP government had little choice in the matter.

It was also the administration’s first experience of a strike. Their first act, on February 11, was to lock us out. This was expected. Of greater surprise, however, was the imposition of unnecessarily provocative restrictions, including the loss of email and of physical access to labs and offices, thus disabling contact with our students and preventing ongoing research.

Administration told us we would be prosecuted if we stepped onto university property, but they wouldn’t tell us where the property lines are. They further informed us that porta-potties were prohibited. The Faculty Association drew a chalk line along the boulevard to demarcate the boundary, and porta-potties were brought in. Administration hired private security. They parked in cars, snapping photos of us. Wide-angle surveillance cameras, positioned high on posts like eagle nests, were also installed. Some faculty were offended by what they viewed as intimidation tactics. The mood quickly changed. There was a sense administration had declared war on faculty.

U of L faculty, March 11, 2022. Strikers wore orange pinnies and marched or waved to passerby, some of whom honked in support. Photo: Trevor Harrison.

The term “war” may seem strong, but it was in many ways an apt metaphor. The Faculty Association set up a downtown command centre. Each weekday, we—“the troops”—checked in for our assigned three-hour shift, three per day between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., for which we received strike pay. We were “commanded” by strike captains. We wore uniforms: orange pinnies. We marched or stood at sentry posts, waving to passersby; some honked in support. Each day, a small battalion of older colleagues occupied folding chairs at their roadside redoubt. We held high our chosen weapons—placards, some declaring our demands, some wryly humorous (“It’s so bad even the introverts are here”). Rallies were held, replete with our demands chanted over loudspeakers.

Lines of supply were organized. By way of a canteen, the association set up a table sporting coffee and sweets, but faculty and community members soon began contributing pots of stew, curried dishes and chili. Umami, a well-known local grocery and deli, provided sandwiches. A communications unit was also created, both to inform faculty members and to counter what members viewed as administration’s misinformation to the public, such as misrepresenting our salary demands and implying that the Faculty Association was the side refusing to negotiate.

We remained hopeful of an early settlement. Most of us believed Reading Week, beginning February 19, would provide the opportunity for sober, serious negotiation, and that we would soon be back teaching and in our research labs. But it didn’t happen. Hope vanished, replaced by anger. Many now saw the administration as engaging in a war of attrition: that it wanted to wait us out, to figuratively starve us into submission in order to balance its books with our lost wages, to perhaps even bust the union.

The mood on the picket line hardened. Our sense of solidarity and resolve deepened. You could hear it in the camaraderie between colleagues and see it in the determined trudge through snow and mud, pickets held high. We were soon buoyed by colleagues arriving from other universities in Alberta and elsewhere to lend support, along with other union members. Some community members and a few New Democrat politicians also dropped by. Especially, however, there were our students.

Young and passionate, they literally stood with us. Several carried signs of their own making: “We stand behind U of L faculty” and “No faculty, no future.” The students wanted to go back to class—online, for now. But they were also concerned about the direction their university was taking. For years they had seen classes get larger, courses get cancelled, and full-time faculty, whom they rely on for guidance, disappear.

For some students, however, the strike/lockout was also an education. Beth, a third-year political science student, noted the event’s role in group formation, a topic discussed in class. Chad, a philosophy major who is studying the language of couples conflict, similarly noted the applicability of his research to the strike/lockout.

Late February saw 30 students stage sit-ins outside the university’s administrative offices. They sang songs and demanded that the board engage seriously in negotiations to end the strike. The administration’s response was to install a camera in the hall. Otherwise, nothing changed. On March 12 faculty held a rally at Lethbridge City Hall in support of students.

The sense of solidarity on the picket lines grew. The atmosphere could even be fun. One professor came dressed in a T-Rex outfit, bearing a sign, “Let’s make a dino-mite deal.” We held a Mardi Gras breakfast, complete with pancakes. Some picketers came dressed up, with prizes for best costume. A student orchestra played steel drums; on other days, a horn section.

People brought their animals: dogs in abundance, a small cat on a leash. On another day, two retired faculty rode horses to site #1. Very Lethbridge.

It was now mid-March. We were standing in that seasonal dead zone between winter and spring—what a friend terms “sprinter”—a combination of snow, drizzle, sun and fog. The best days are warm (never hot); the worst are cold. I was glad for hand and toe warmers. On the first day of striking, a picketer had fallen on ice and been injured. The faculty association called off picketing for the rest of that day. Later, as temperatures dropped to freezing, picketing was suspended for a couple of days. But on better days we enlarged our perimeter. Some of us hiked over the bridge on Whoop-Up Drive, the main thoroughfare joining west Lethbridge to our downtown campus. We carried flags and signs, braced like sails against the Lethbridge winds. It felt good.

We continued to march, to raise our voices and our signs. Was anyone listening?

Term-to-term contracts and low wages, with no benefits, make it difficult for an academic to raise a family.

Every conflict has multiple causes. Letters in the Lethbridge Herald suggested some members of the public thought we were striking over wages. This was true only to a point. Faculty salaries at the U of L have fallen steadily against inflation and by comparison with similar institutions over the past decade. But several of us on the picket line were recently retired or—like myself—are soon to be retired. We were there out of loyalty to an institution we helped build and out of a sense of fairness betrayed.

Money does matter a great deal to some faculty, however, especially to our sessional and instructor colleagues. Take the case of Bruce. He has taught multiple courses in three different departments over nearly a decade, with no marking support. He’s an academic Swiss army knife, ready to step in and teach courses at a moment’s notice. Administration gives him lots of praise, but no security and only a meagre paycheque with no benefits. (As negotiations began, the yearly salary of the highest-paid sessional instructor was $39,000.) Bruce supplements his salary by teaching at a nearby college and by writing independent reports.

Term instructors are not much better off than sessional teachers: only slightly more job security and slightly higher pay, with benefits. But they too are overworked—teaching seven to eight course equivalents per year, often requiring new preparations—and underappreciated, with no credit for writing and research, though many do it. One long-term instructor informed me during the strike/lockout that strike pay meant she would likely pocket more money during the dispute than when she was teaching! Sessional teachers did comparatively even better, some earning three times their usual salary.

So, yes, money does matter for some individual faculty. But the issue was also one of fairness and equity. And many of us fear post-secondary institutions cannot survive if faculty are reduced to underpaid, overworked, transient members of the precariat.

One prominent picket sign read “Respect, Equity, Parity.” I heard that first word repeatedly as I walked the line. A sense of disrespect by government and administration permeated talk. Long-time faculty spoke of decision-making being increasingly top-down and non-collegial. Administrative appointments made without significant faculty input was a particular sore point.

Things had come to a head during the year leading up to the strike/lockout, when administration had presented to faculty its restructuring plans meant to deal with the government budget cuts. The process involved numerous task forces, meetings and presentations, gestures that administration viewed as consultation but which many faculty felt were highly orchestrated to reach predetermined outcomes. Many faculty especially doubted administration’s repeated claims that restructuring wouldn’t mean the end of certain courses and programs. While everything remains unsettled, the phony consultation contributed to a general feeling that faculty’s voice in decision-making wasn’t being respected and that collegial governance had to be restored.

Faculty felt “consultations” were orchestrated to reach predetermined outcomes.

Tuesday, March 15. Anger and frustration were rising. Rumour and gossip were rife. But on that day, spirits on the picket lines were also high. The Board and the Faculty Association were meeting through a mediator. Previous meetings in December and January hadn’t been successful, but the situation was different now. We had taken the measure of each other, and no one was winning.

The initial news was mildly positive and it soon got better. By Friday, March 18, a tentative agreement was reached. All that was required was ratification by both sides.

The strike/lockout officially ended on March 21. Over 90 per cent of faculty approved the deal. The Board agreed to destroy the surveillance video tapes. The Faculty Association agreed to drop the filing—made a few days earlier—of an unfair labour practice complaint. We returned to our “barracks,” relieved to be going back to our teaching and research.

What did the strike achieve Faculty, as a whole, made few monetary gains. But sessional teachers received an 8 per cent increase to their stipend, though the highest salary will still be only $7,020 per course. Instructors received percentage increases less than inflation, and not kicking in until 2023, but did gain a rise in their salary cap. Little progress was made on non-monetary issues, though we succeeded in defending some rights and benefits. And we gained recognition of the rights, privileges and responsibilities of faculty members to participate in the making of policies and procedures, as well as membership on a number of governing committees. Still, many faculty remain disappointed at the settlement and angry at the government and administration for having provoked a dispute that harmed students, faculty and the university’s reputation.

We held a final rally on March 21. It was likely the last time many of us will get together. When I drove by site #1 a few days later, I imagined picketers still walking, waving, holding signs: proud, undefeated. Sometimes you fight not because you think you’ll win, but because you have no other choice, and trying to avoid that choice only costs you something more: your self-respect. We faculty at the University of Lethbridge came out of the strike stronger, more unified and more determined than before. That solidarity may well prove to be the strike’s long-term legacy.

Trevor Harrison is a professor of sociology at the University of Lethbridge and a former director of the Parkland Institute.

The post Professors Pushed to the Edge appeared first on Alberta Views.

The post Should Union Membership Be Optional? appeared first on Alberta Views.

Bill 9 (the Public Sector Wage Arbitration Deferral Act) broke contracts by suspending arbitrations about wage increases until at least the late fall of 2019. Delaying these arbitrations meant pushing off the first opportunity in several years for approximately 180,000 public-sector workers to receive cost-of-living wage increases. Workers—mostly women—who had seen the arbitrations as recompense for agreeing to a two-year wage freeze (2017–2019) felt betrayed.

The government asserted the delay was necessary so it could get a handle on the province’s finances. But despite characterizing Alberta’s fiscal state as “worse than expected,” the government simultaneously handed business owners approximately $4.5-billion in tax cuts over four years. Picket signs reading “Millions for corporations; crumbs for workers” noted this apparent hypocrisy.

Workers weren’t the only ones skeptical of the government’s supposed need for a delay. In August, Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Eric Macklin granted the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE) an injunction, allowing arbitrations for 65,000 workers to go ahead. Macklin noted that “given the current highly publicized economic climate in Alberta, it is unclear what other information [the Government of Alberta] would be seeking on Alberta’s economy and financial state to support its position.” Macklin’s injunction was subsequently overturned in a split decision by the Court of Appeal.

Workers and their unions predicted that Bill 9 would be the first step towards legislated wage freezes or rollbacks when the Legislature resumed sitting in October. Rollbacks would certainly help the government pay for the giant tax break it gave employers. For public-sector workers and union activists, it’s hard not to see Bill 9 as the first shot in what’s quickly becoming a nasty scrap between Alberta’s unions and the government of Jason Kenney.

Bill 9 demonstrates that this government can’t be trusted to honour legally binding contracts.

Jason Kenney’s lengthy career in federal politics shows him consistently favouring the interests of employers over those of workers. The Harper government, in which Kenney was a senior cabinet minister, repeatedly intervened in work stoppages, in 2007 (CN Rail), 2011 (Canada Post) and 2012 (Air Canada and CP Rail), to the benefit of the employer. It also legislated a wage freeze for federal employees in 2009 (including overriding previously negotiated increases) and made union certification votes mandatory in 2014. Just before being defeated in 2015, Harper’s government required more onerous financial disclosure from unions.

Kenney also personally directed the expansion of the temporary foreign worker (TFW) program, which saw the number of TFWs in Alberta rise from 21,973 in 2006 to a high of 68,339 in 2012. Labour shortages were used to justify this surge, but subsequent analysis found little evidence of absolute labour shortages in most occupations. Rather, not enough Canadian workers were prepared to do the work given the low wages and poor working conditions on offer. By loosening the labour market, Kenney’s TFW program allowed employers to avoid increasing wages and improving working conditions for Canadians. The vulnerability of TFWs—whose residency is tied to a specific employer—meant many were subject to wage theft and other forms of exploitation.

Kenney was also responsible for overhauling federal labour market training funding and forcing his Canada Job Grant (CJG) program on provincial governments. The CJG gave employers the ability to spend $5,000 on training and get $10,000 in public funds. Kenney promised that this would incentivize employers to hire and train unemployed Canadians. After two years, however, only 1 per cent of CJG-funded trainees in Alberta were from the ranks of the unemployed. Instead, employers used the CJG to subsidize training for existing employees (mostly men already possessing a post-secondary credential). Subsidizing employer costs significantly reduced funding available to train unemployed Albertans.

The United Conservative Party 2019 provincial election platform (on which Kenney famously “held the pen”) promised similar changes, intended to “bring balance back to Alberta’s labour laws, restore workplace democracy and incentivize the creation of youth employment.”

The Kenney government wasted no time in moving against workers and their unions. Within a month of being elected, the government introduced Bill 2 (An Act to Make Alberta Open for Business). In combination with some regulatory changes, Bill 2 reduced the youth minimum wage, created an overtime pay loophole and made it harder for workers to join a union.

Effective June 26, 2019, the minimum wage for students under 18 dropped from $15 per hour to $13. This 13 per cent reduction was framed as a “job creation” incentive by the government. Awkwardly, no evidence exists that reducing the youth minimum wage increases hiring. Instead, lower youth minimum wages in Australia and Denmark have incentivized employers to reduce young workers’ hours and eventually sack them as they approach age 18 in order to minimize labour costs. Alberta abolished its youth wage in 1998 because employers were abusing it.

There’s also no evidence that Alberta needed such an incentive. The rate at which Alberta 15–24-year-olds participated in the labour force in 2018 (64.3 per cent) was slightly higher than the Canadian average (63.3 per cent). This wage reduction is really just a gift to employers. Annually, it transfers from workers to employers approximately $29-million in wages for every day per week worked by Alberta’s 35,000 employees under 18. Some employers are leaving pay levels as is because of the poor optics of grinding teens’ wages. For example, in Edmonton, the public library was embarrassed into reversing a planned reduction in wages for its youngest workers.

Bill 2 also opened a loophole in overtime regulations. Beginning in fall 2019, employers could pay overtime taken as time off at straight time rates, thereby evading the usual 50 per cent overtime premium. This doesn’t sound like a significant change until you do the math. If each of Alberta’s 412,000 workers who worked overtime (on average, 10 hours per week) were instead forced to take their OT as time off, this would transfer $63.5-million per week ($3.3-billion annually) from workers to employers.

Finally, Bill 2 requires that every union organizing drive include a vote. Previously, when a union could demonstrate that at least 65 per cent of workers had signed union cards, certification was automatic. Research shows that employers use the delay caused by mandatory votes to interfere (often illegally) with workers’ decisions about whether or not to unionize. For example, they may fire union supporters or threaten to close the business if the workers vote to unionize. Consequently, mandatory votes result in fewer organizing drives and a lower success rate.

Bill 2 was followed almost immediately by Bill 9, which interfered with already negotiated collective agreements. Most public-sector workers had agreed to a two-year wage freeze followed by further negotiations in 2019 (a “wage reopener”). This arrangement was widely viewed as unions agreeing to push off the question of wage increases in order to deny the UCP the opportunity to use public-sector increases as a weapon against the New Democrats in the 2019 election. These agreements included provisions that any impasse over the wage reopener would be resolved by an arbitrator (i.e., a neutral third party) with hard deadlines for a decision (e.g., June 30, 2019). These arbitration provisions gave the unions some comfort that—should the NDs lose the election—a fair process to decide on wage increases would still occur in year three.

Bill 9 suspended these arbitration hearings until Hallowe’en. The Kenney government said it needed a delay to receive the report of a “blue ribbon” financial review panel. The MacKinnon Report was released on September 3 and suggested setting, through legislation, a bargaining mandate to reduce public-sector compensation. The report’s authors also suggested that if negotiations resulted in work stoppages, the government use the mandate as the basis of back-to-work legislation. Further, if a legislated bargaining mandate were found by the courts to be unconstitutional (because, by predetermining the outcome, it rendered bargaining meaningless), the government could use the notwithstanding clause to override the Charter. These recommendations reinforced the initial belief of public-sector workers and their unions that Bill 9 was a stalling tactic so the government could enact a wage freeze or rollback in the late autumn. This delay would also mean any wage legislation would come after the federal election so as to reduce any political damage it might cause to federal conservative politicians.

The legislative debate over Bill 9 was raucous, with the government invoking closure and Premier Kenney being accused of handing out earplugs during an overnight debate, presumably so his MLAs didn’t have to listen to opposition concerns. AUPE launched a Charter challenge of Bill 9, asserting it violated workers’ rights to a meaningful collective bargaining process by unilaterally voiding negotiated provisions. Because such challenges take a long time, AUPE also sought an injunction to allow arbitrations hearings to proceed. Justice Macklin issued the injunction and noted: “It is in the long-term public interest to see that… government cannot unilaterally change its contractual obligations through legislation.” Since Macklin’s injunction was overturned by the Court of Appeal, Bill 9 remains in force.

During the summer, public-sector unions began mobilizing their members by hosting lunch-hour and after-work pickets across the province. These pickets attached a political cost to Bill 9. More importantly, they built awareness among union members that the government was attacking their rights. Such actions also normalize collective activity (e.g., picketing) and teach union members how to organize job actions on their own. This gives workers the ability to initiate direct job action locally—such as slowdowns, sick-outs and wildcat strikes—should the Kenney government legislate a wage freeze or rollback.

Paradoxically, a mobilized membership can actually prevent labour conflict. The political costs of job action in the public service, education and, most especially, healthcare are often so severe that the government may prefer to negotiate rather than legislate. While it’s easy to dismiss the idea of such unrest happening in Alberta, recall that Alberta has a history of wildcat strikes. In 1994 laundry workers at Calgary’s General and Foothills hospitals walked out to protest the cuts and privatization agenda of Ralph Klein. Within days, the wildcat strikes had spread to six other hospitals and nine nursing homes, with many other workers engaging in work-to-rule campaigns. Despite pressure from organized labour to end the illegal walkout, the work stoppages appeared set to spread, and Klein blinked, cancelling $53-million in scheduled healthcare cuts.

More recent wildcats occurred in healthcare (2000, 2012), construction (2007) and the prison system (2013). It may seem surprising that workers in such a reputedly anti-union province periodically put down their tools, but workers who over-identify with the boss’s interests (and thus adopt a “git ’er done” mindset) tend to react very poorly when they are being obviously mistreated and feel betrayed. Some quit. Some work slower. Some destroy equipment. And those with a means to act collectively will sometimes down tools and demand better treatment.

Unions don’t like to talk about wildcats, because such strikes can result in crippling fines. Yet Bill 9 incentivizes unions to mobilize their members, because it demonstrates that this government can’t be trusted to honour legally binding contracts. The legal recourse available to unions is simply too slow to give meaningful remedy. If, for example, the Kenney government legislates a wage rollback, a Charter challenge will take years, and in the meantime, members go without a wage increase and the union looks powerless. Often, direct action (or the threat of it) is a much more effective way to ensure the employer holds up its end of the bargain.

Smart politicians avoid escalating tensions to the point where the authority and legitimacy of government are in jeopardy.

Governments are well aware of the power of a wildcat strike. In Alberta they have drafted laws designed to force unions to quash illegal strikes or face crippling financial penalties. What is often overlooked by this approach is that workers simply can’t be forced to work. Yes, the government can fine and seek to jail workers, but these consequences take time to unfold. In the meantime, no one is changing grandmother’s diaper in the seniors lodge or teaching Johnny his ABCs while his parents are at work. And if the workers are prepared to accept the punishment, then the government has no real way to control matters. This is especially the case if the wildcat starts to spread.

Consider the 2013 jail guard strike. On Friday, April 26, 2013, corrections officers at the Edmonton Remand Centre walked off the job to protest unsafe conditions and the suspension (and later firing) of guards for complaining. Over the weekend, guards at eight other Alberta jails joined the wildcat strike. On Monday, sheriffs at the Edmonton and Calgary courthouses were out and were soon joined by clerical staff. Premier Alison Redford inflamed matters and ended up relying on the courts to issue massive fines to force the workers back.

This wildcat demonstrates how quickly and easily a government can lose control by antagonizing workers. If the contempt fines hadn’t ended the strike, the judge would likely have ordered the arrest of peaceful strikers. Such an order could well have triggered a general strike—the snowballing momentum of the strike suggests this was a possibility. It could also have resulted in cops (most of whom are unionized) balking at arresting fellow law-enforcement officers for protesting unsafe working conditions. If that happened—and again I’d say this was possible—at that moment the government would have lost control over the province. Smart politicians go out of their way to avoid escalating tensions to the point where the authority and legitimacy of government are in jeopardy.

With public-sector wages, the government had three options. It could defer the fight by accepting that a deal is a deal and allowing the wage reopener arbitrations to proceed. It could save face by cutting public spending without necessarily freezing or rolling back wages. It could double down, legislate or otherwise mandate wage freezes or rollbacks, and take its chances with unions in the courts and in the streets.

The October 2019 budget continued a hiring freeze in the public sector with planned layoffs for 2020 (some contracts preclude layoffs until then). It also cut funding to government agencies, boards and commissions, which employ significant numbers of workers. In this way the UCP could declare victory by reducing spending without much risk of job action.

The government allowed arbitration to proceed but changed its position from no increase in wages to a 2 to 5 per cent rollback. This puts most unions back at the bargaining table in spring or summer of 2020. The delay could sap unions’ momentum and allow for the economic picture to worsen, which would bolster the government’s case for concessions.

Bill 21 (Ensuring Fiscal Sustainability Act, 2019) was introduced in late October. Hidden in the bill is legislation entitled the Public Sector Employers Act, which allows the government to issue secret and binding bargaining directives to public-sector employers, including specifying financial settlements and contract length. Such mandates make collective bargaining largely meaningless because the government has predetermined the outcome. Bill 21 also allows for replacement workers during strikes.

While Bill 21 will almost certainly be challenged as contrary to the Charter, this will be slow going. In the meantime, unions may be stuck taking job action (whether legal or illegal) in order to secure acceptable contracts. A few days of cancelled surgeries or no access to childcare (which is a key service that the K–12 system provides) would create a lot of unhappy Albertans. An open question is whether the public would support striking workers (e.g., nurses and teachers) or the UCP. 

The UCP’s aggressive attack on workers and unions in its first few months suggests a tumultuous term lies ahead. Key issues to watch will include the Kenney government further rolling back labour law changes enacted by the Notley government and seeking to interfere with union dues collection (a UCP election promise). Kenney in 2020 may also face public-sector workers exercising their recently acquired right to strike.

Bob Barnetson lives in Edmonton and is an assistant professor of labour relations at Athabasca University.

The post Kenney’s War on Workers appeared first on Alberta Views.

So testified Calgary laundry worker Jean McWilliams in early May 1919 before the Commission to Inquire into and Report upon Industrial Relations in Canada, chaired by Thomas Graham Mathers, Chief Justice of Manitoba. Prime Minister Robert Borden had established the commission that March in reply to wartime and post-war labour unrest. Just weeks afterwards, McWilliams would become a key organizer of the month-long Calgary General Strike. As May ended, over 10,000 workers in a largely agricultural province of fewer than 600,000 residents were on strike. They included 6,500 coal miners, many striking in solidarity with British Columbia miners demanding restoration of pay cuts that left them unable to feed their families.

Miners in both provinces voted overwhelmingly to join the One Big Union (OBU), a radical new organization sanctioned by the Western Labour Conference in March. The OBU argued that when workers for one employer struck, all workers should strike in solidarity. That would supposedly influence all employers to pressure a recalcitrant capitalist to capitulate. Eventually, it was thought, the philosophy of “an injury to one is an injury to all” would lead workers to overthrow the capitalist system altogether, either at the ballot box or through revolutionary workplace activity. Solidarity strikes involving all workers in a particular city or in one industry across provincial boundaries were termed “general strikes.”

May 15, 1919: In this cauldron of misery, the workers of Winnipeg—some 30,000 men and women, most of the city’s labour force—struck.

International, national and local factors contributed to revolutionary fervour in Alberta cities and coal mines in mid-1919. Disruptions produced by the Great War of 1914–1918 were immediately responsible, but the anger had deeper roots in working-class unrest that the rise of industrial capitalism had already engendered for a century. Socialists regarded the First World War as a slugfest of competing Western capitalists for control over Asia, Africa and central Europe, using workers as cannon fodder. While nationalism among workers in warring countries blunted that critique in 1914, its popularity grew as the war prolonged. Fighting killed 16 million people, with even more perishing from the “Spanish flu” that spread quickly as soldiers returned home. Wartime inflation devastated workers, who increasingly attributed it to capitalist superprofits from selling munitions and provisioning armies. Workers suffering while others prospered provoked the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the German revolt that forced the Kaiser to flee Germany in 1918 and yield power to the Social Democratic leaders.

In Alberta, war created labour shortages. Many workers, previously afraid to unionize or strike because employers routinely dismissed non-submissive workers, organized and went on strikes, including general strikes, for wage increases. Strikes accounted for 600,000 workdays in Alberta from January 1, 1917, to June 30, 1919. The Hillcrest coal mine explosion of 1914, which cost 189 lives, ensured that Alberta’s militant miners would ignore government warnings that wartime strikes were treasonous. Though a coroner’s inquest concluded that Hillcrest operators had violated Coal Mines Act regulations, no charges followed. Miners understood that only militancy could protect them against profit-obsessed mine owners. Continual strikes in 1916 and 1917 forced the federal government to seize temporary ownership from mine owners and then appease miner demands to keep the mines running.

In January 1918 Edmonton City Council moved to appoint an outsider as city fire chief, ignoring a tradition of naming the senior city firefighter to the position. When 17 union locals voted to strike in solidarity with the firemen, the council rescinded that decision. In September 1918 the federal government made a similar turnaround, dropping a threat to legislate striking freight handlers back to work after half of Calgary unionists joined a solidarity strike called by the Calgary Trades and Labour Council (CTLC). Edmonton’s Trades and Labour Council also endorsed a sympathy strike with striking railworkers that accelerated a negotiated settlement.

Such victories dismayed governments and employers who feared that workers’ power exercised through general strikes would weaken the capitalist system. The response was repressive measures meant both to suppress radical organizations and sow division between British-origin and other workers. In September and October 1918 alone, the wartime federal cabinet banned publications in “enemy languages,” declared 14 radical organizations illegal and prohibited strikes and lockouts. The “syndicalist” Industrial Workers of the World—long-time advocates of solidarity strikes—and socialist ethnic organizations were the main targets of repression. Past membership in banned organizations became sufficient excuse for arrest and imprisonment. At war’s end, the government quickly doubled its “national security” personnel and revised its immigration laws to exclude citizens of enemy countries and individuals deemed potential radicals. Radicals without citizenship were deported.

But the successes of threatened general strikes during wartime alongside continuing class inequalities emboldened many workers to resist government and employer repression. The miner-dominated Alberta Federation of Labour convention of January 1919 voted “full accord and sympathy with the aims and purposes of the Russian and German revolutions.” Organized workers were angry that Canada had joined the US, Britain and France in rerouting troops from the former German front to support deposed Russian elites attempting to oust the Communist government and restore the czarist regime.

“Mrs. George Corse,” a worker, mother of six children, and a representative of the CTLC, outlined to the Mathers Commission the conditions that were creating revolutionary sentiment. Though she opposed revolution, Corse believed that governments must implement sweeping reforms. She had helped to investigate working conditions of female employees of Calgary stores, restaurants and hotels after a strike in 1918 of cooks and waitresses. Employers were ignoring the nine dollars per week minimum wage for women, a wage that would barely cover rent for a single woman.

“Girls in Calgary are working in places which have not sanitary accommodation all day long and there is absolutely nothing done about it, and that is one of the reasons why there is so much unrest among the women. Almost every day, women are being added to the ranks of, shall I say, the socialist party or those with socialist inclinations. We mothers find it is practically impossible to dress our children and to give them the education we feel they should have, on the money our husbands can earn. I myself… have taken my two eldest boys from school and put them to work, simply because I could not keep them at school out of my husband’s earnings.”

Her rent had recently risen from $15 to $25 a month and heating and food costs rose similarly while wages barely budged.

A Labour member of the Calgary School Board, Corse lamented that only 6 per cent of Calgary children reached high school. Post-war unemployment made things worse. The federal government was doing little to transition the economy from wartime to peacetime. As munitions factories closed and troops were sent home, unemployment was soaring. Unemployed, unskilled labourers could not send their children to school because they could not afford clothes and boots for them. “Then again we find the terrible dread of the future, the working man is… unable to provide anything for his future, he is unable to provide for sickness.”

On May 15, 1919, in this cauldron of misery, the workers of Winnipeg struck a major blow for worker solidarity. Metal workers and construction workers who wanted industry-wide bargaining met with resistance from employers who insisted on trade-by-trade negotiations. These workers decided to strike and asked other Winnipeg unionists to launch a solidarity strike. That meant potentially a strike of 12,000 workers. But to everyone’s surprise, some 30,000 men and women struck, most of the city’s labour force. The Strike Committee co-operated with the municipal council and authorized essential workers to continue their labour. But the city’s capitalists, angered that workers played any role in deciding who would work, united to demand that the federal government use military force to end a largely peaceful six-week strike. Non-unionized female and male workers alike spontaneously joined the strike in the hope that such solidarity would force employers to allow even easily replaceable workers to unionize and live with dignity.

The Winnipeg General Strike inspired solidarity strikes across Canada. In each case workers believed that victory for the Winnipeg workers would lead to gains for themselves. Outside Winnipeg the strikes were generally limited to unionists, since other workers feared employer retribution in the face of rising unemployment. General strikes called by the local trades and labour councils lasted from May 26 to June 25 in Edmonton and Calgary. Lethbridge and Medicine Hat unionists also voted overwhelmingly to strike, but their leaders stalled. In Edmonton, with 66,000 residents, about 2,000 workers—over half the city’s unionized labour force—was on strike for all or part of the general strike. In Calgary over 1,500 workers in a city of 72,000 souls participated. In both cities, municipal employees initially joined the walkouts, but returned to work when their mayors vowed to fire all who failed to do so immediately. Southern Alberta’s miners, already on strike before the Winnipeg strike began, remained on strike for several months. Some were starved into submission, while Drumheller miners were dragged back to work with threats of being hanged if they rejoined the strike. Though 95 per cent of miners in District 18 of the United Mine Workers of America (which included most miners from BC to Saskatchewan) voted to join the OBU, the federal government ordered them to remain in the UMWA, whose leaders had co-operated with mine owners and the government against member wishes.

Drumheller miners were dragged back to work with threats of being hanged if they rejoined the strike. Union leaders had co-operated with mine owners.

The Winnipeg General Strike ended after the North-West Mounted Police violently attacked strikers at a pro-strike veterans gathering. The government had prohibited striker demonstrations. With two men dead and many others injured, strike leaders called off the strike. Sympathy strikes in other cities soon ended as well. Attention turned to campaigns to protest government efforts to prosecute the more radical Winnipeg leaders.

Before and after the strikes, the workers’ movement was riven with divisions between reformists and revolutionaries. Reformists believed that unionizing workers and electing labour-friendly legislators would change the capitalist system sufficiently to make it palatable. Revolutionaries regarded capitalism as psychopathy that needed to be ended in favour of either state socialism, as Communists argued, or a grassroots worker-controlled economy, extolled by anarchists. The majority of prairie workers voted to join the OBU before a combination of state, employer and trade union leaders collaborated to remove that option for most workers. In Alberta, however, the pro-OBU majority was small and dependent upon the miners.

In 1921, in Alberta’s first post-strike election, four Labour members were elected, including Philip Martin Christophers, a revolutionary Crowsnest miner who had been an OBU organizer, and Alex Ross, an anti-OBU Calgary stonemason whom the new United Farmers of Alberta included in their cabinet to represent workers.

Over the next 14 years, before Social Credit obliterated both Labour and the UFA, tensions among workers regarding co-operation with the austerity-minded UFA persisted. Similar debates endure in Alberta to this day regarding whether the labour movement should engage in permanent efforts to organize and mobilize workers, or simply count on its NDP friends to represent worker interests quietly in the legislature. Some worker-friendly legislation has been won over time, thanks to worker militancy. But the uprisings of 1919 still serve as a reminder of the bleak prospects for workers when unfettered capitalism reigns.

Alvin Finkel is president of the Alberta Labour History Institute and author of Compassion: A Global History of Social Policy.

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The post Our Almost-Revolution appeared first on Alberta Views.

From “Swather As Threshold” in Afternoon Starlight

Charles Noble, poet, in these lines is speaking about being part of a farming family. His lineage goes back 115 years to his grandfather, Charles Sherwood Noble (hereafter called C.S.), who pioneered and innovated as a farmer in southern Alberta beginning in 1902, three years before the formation of the provincial Department of Agriculture. C.S. became famous even beyond his region.

“Grandfather was a gambler. He came from nothing,” says the younger Charles. Today, C.S.’s descendants still farm land—not the same fields, but nearby—east of Barons, northeast of Nobleford and about 40 kilometres north of Lethbridge. Charles, his younger brother Bryan and other family members including Bryan’s wife, Carol, work the farm.

Back in 1902, Iowa-born C.S. came up from North Dakota and acquired a homestead at Claresholm, where he would break the soil with a team of oxen. Lore has it that he was seen in 1905 plowing a field in bare feet, with three oxen and a horse.

This land, previously inhabited by Indigenous peoples of the Blackfoot Confederacy, is in the southwestern portion of the Palliser Triangle, the semi-arid region surveyed by John Palliser between 1857 and 1860 that stretches through what is now southern Saskatchewan and Alberta. Palliser declared that the land was too dry for farming. Soon, however, the Canadian government was advertising it as good for growing wheat, and immigrants from poorer countries began flooding in.

Lore has it that C.S. Noble was seen in 1905 plowing a field in bare feet, with three oxen and a horse. By 1918 he had the biggest farm in the British Empire.

By 1907 C.S. Noble was already showing himself to be an ambitious, innovative, knowledgeable farmer and an astute businessman. “Take your soil seriously,” he said. By 1908 he was among the first to use a steam tractor to plow. In 1909 he bought 5,520 acres northwest of Lethbridge and moved the family there. The hamlet that arose nearby took the Noble name. C.S. built a general store and houses in the area. The hamlet was renamed Nobleford in 1913. C.S. combined his soil savvy with tolerance for risk, visionary scope spiced with megalomania, a dose of charisma and a penchant for “bigger.” His yields earned him championship titles—“Flax King” of Alberta in 1912, “Oat King” in 1915, and in 1916 “Wheat King” with a yield averaging 53 bushels per acre on 1,606 acres. By 1918 C.S. had the biggest farm in the British Empire, at 56 sections, or just under 36,000 acres. At one point he was running 600 horses and 61 binders. But in 1921 things took a bad turn. Drought, grasshoppers, hail, falling wheat prices, cutworms and creditors darkened the glory.

The world is falling apart
not apocalyptically apart
nor humpty-dumpty down
entropically at times
other times the King’s men
are up to the job
and a not terribly just
redistribution is born

Untitled excerpt from Mack The Naïf

C.S. lost almost everything, including the family house, but within eight years he had recovered and gone on to greater things. During the dusty devastation of the Dirty Thirties, he turned his mind and his machinery to soil integrity. He sought a method of tilling for fallow without disturbing the surface residue, to minimize soil drifting caused by rampaging winds. In 1936, at age 62, he invented a revolutionary farm implement—the Noble blade cultivator, a flat blade that cut through subsoil and disturbed the weeds but left the surface plant material bound and holding together against the winds. He fabricated a few blades for nearby farmers, and before long, demand—from down the road or as far away as Russia and Australia—became so great that he created an industry.

Up and down Alberta you travelled,
once on the railroad, on a handcar
preaching to the gathered farmers in small towns
methods of controlling the terrible soil drifting.
In the photograph you stand over six feet
in the crop up to your shoulders.

From “Big Ears In The Fields Say The Railroad Is Coming Through Till The Trains Flatten Them, or, The Devil’s CN” in Afternoon Starlight

While heading Noble Cultivators Ltd. and manufacturing other agricultural implements to keep up with changing technologies, C.S. continued to farm until his death in 1957. His son Gerald Noble was president and general manager of the manufacturing and farming enterprises. C.S. had also created the Noble Foundation to benefit his employees through profit sharing. At its operational height it had over 300 employees, and most of them referred to C.S. as “The Chief.”

“I relate to my grandfather through my father,” says Bryan Noble. “He was the main man in working for my grandfather…. He was put in charge of cleaning up the messes…. They had tremendous respect for one another but they had their battles.” Gerald, who had a degree in agriculture from the University of Alberta, was the troubleshooter and only person who would stand up to C.S. when he came up with a risky idea for expansion.

Charles elaborates: “Father was a good mechanic and welder and he used every excuse to get out of the office. He wanted to be more a farmer than a general manager of a cultivator company… there was a lot of stress… managing the company, all those employees, dealing with the bank. Dad was only 49 when he had the stroke and a heart attack at 51.” Gerald’s wife, Lillian, was also active in the businesses. Gerald Noble survived and continued his management role until the business was sold in 1978, living a year after that, to age 72.

The telephone rang as we expected it would.
I let my mother answer in her bedroom
while I sat in the big armchair in the den and waited,
hot and cold shivers electrified my back,
they did nothing but hook deeper.
A lump formed in my throat.
Finally she came into the front hall
and told me he was gone.

From “The Telephone Rang” in Afternoon Starlight

The desire to farm remained strong in the family. Bryan and Charles, as partners, with dividends from Noble Cultivators and the necessary bank loan, purchased their first land in 1981. They now farm 4,100 acres, or 6½ sections.

Bryan reflects on the knowledge milieu of his grandfather’s era: “It was a very different environment then. There was the Lethbridge research station. The door swung both ways. There was a great intellectual exchange between my grandfather and others. Now there’s been a complete erosion of that. I like to use the expression that it’s the closure of the intellectual commons, the conversation on patenting, genetics and varieties and so on. Now you see that all this public good has been transferred by governments trying to decouple from the expense of it. We have these beautiful research stations; we once had all the state-based funding for the scientists, but now their operational funds come from large agricultural firms. With the ability to patent technologies that once flowed freely from the research facilities, companies can bundle technologies primarily for their own gain. Common good is at best accidental. The landscape begins to become a reflection of these patented bundles of technology, for better or worse. Notions of research for public good, both present and future, are clouded in the process and it reshapes the countryside.”

“I have a tendency to feel like I’m under siege most of the time,” says Bryan. “Every time we would have market crashes or droughts, you would have this tremendous crush of people going out of business, and [the government’s] quick answer was… bigger farms… they’d be more economically sustainable… beginning with the Liberal federal governments from the 1960s and 1970s. It wasn’t publicized, but they had all sorts of policies to try and phase the smaller farms out.”

Of his poetry Charles says, “My aesthetic is digression upon digression and recapitulation trying to figure out—risking getting lost, in fact enjoying being lost.”

Nonetheless, the Nobles have shown that the “small” farm, if well and knowledgeably managed, is viable. “The moisture battle”—as Bryan calls it—is a constant challenge. Bryan is a proponent of no-till farming and continuous cropping, and he understands the science: “Each time you till a field you probably lose half an inch of moisture. You’re only getting eight, nine, ten inches of moisture in the summer season. If you till it five times you’ve lost two and a half or three inches of reserve moisture. Plus, as you break down the straw cover you lose a lot more to evaporation.” And microorganisms are depleted when tilling diminishes the plant material. On those fields left fallow you have the high cost and impact on the soil of weeding by machine, plus lost crop revenue, as compared to the expense of using herbicide and less fuel when “recropping.”

Standing in the farm
with botany, mechanics and business
clawing the air
over the frozen economy of buildings and fields.…
standing where the bank’s interest
sniffs around the fields and into the yard
like a twister …

From “Working Yourself Up” in Afternoon Starlight

Charles Noble is now semi-retired from farming and tills a different soil. He cultivates words—as an avid student of social and economic philosophy reading deeply into the heaviest tomes, and as a practising poet with 12 books to his credit. His work has appeared with publishers in Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Ontario.

“When I went to university [of Alberta],” he says, “I started writing poems instead of going to my physics class. I published in a little literary magazine that was inserted into the university paper.”

Charles received a BA in English and philosophy. He can readily discuss philosophers and economic and social critics from Plato to Kant, Hegel, Marx and Peirce. And poets Jon Whyte, Sid Marty, Walter Hildebrandt or Robert Kroetsch might pepper his conversation. The scope of his own poetry is as wide as the plains, and can be rural or urbane, serious or witty, referencing agriculture or modern myth, while harrowing language for its humour or authenticity.

Wheat plants rose out of the ground. I climbed up
and walked across their heads where the music faded
arousing the wind in the leaves and the dust we created.

From “2001 Monoliths” in Haywire Rainbow

The family takes pride in having a poet among them. Carol says, “I brag about it all the time, to everybody.” Bryan, who has an honours degree in English literature, continues, “It’s a source of pride, for sure. And there’s a circle of people in Lethbridge who overlap in the research and farming sectors that are aware of him.”

Charles, freer now to pursue his passions, is a fixture in two towns—Nobleford, where he occupies the grand family house, and Banff, where he’s lived part time every year since 1971 and where he can be found, evenings, reading or writing in his “office,” over two glasses of wine, at the end of the bar in the Saltlik Steakhouse.

“When I first moved here [to Banff], my mother and father were both alive and I wanted a little more freedom, rather than living in my parents’ home.… Banff was ideal… it was a nice size and I would run into these interesting artists and poets. So now I have two residences, and I like going back and forth. I like the big house [in Nobleford] with its 7,000-plus books and I like my den, that La-Z-Boy and a nice lamp.” By contrast, in Banff he’s “in a little cabin.”

Swinging down the middle lie
of Banff Avenue
at six thirty in the morning in August—
the light is visibly swelling
but is still coloured by the physical dark,
still given grey by the night psyche

From “I” in Banff/breaking

On crafting his poems Noble says, “My aesthetic is digression upon digression and recapitulation trying to figure out—risking getting lost, in fact enjoying being lost, and then recapitulation in order to find out how I got there… When I’m writing a poem I have lots of time to think.”

Now with Charles assisting just as needed, Bryan and Carol conduct the day-to-day farm operation in this area they’ve known all their lives. “I grew up in Barons,” says Carol. “Bryan played baseball with my brother. We were at parties together up at Keho Lake. That’s how we met.” Now their three children are grown and have dispersed.

“The one thing that’s most rare about our particular farm is that we’re probably the last generation that owns the bulk of their land,” says Bryan. “As land values go up it’s extremely hard to recapitalize every generation.” And few farm family offspring want to stay.

Daughter Jayne lives in Golden. Andrea lives in Nelson, but she does love to come back and help part time with the farm. She has a degree in fine arts and is reported to be terrific at maintaining a combine, not just driving one. “She sets it, fuels it, greases it,” says Bryan with a hint of pride. Michael, 32, an excellent mechanic, commutes from Lethbridge to work full time on the farm.

Bryan notes, “Michael looks at living here and I think one of the biggest holdbacks for him is that his kids would have to ride one and one half to two hours a day to go to school, likely in Picture Butte.”

Yet Michael, it seems, is the natural heir. “Michael has a good chance,” Bryan says, “by the good graces of his uncle [Charles], who is making it as easy as possible for him to take over the farm by not demanding to be bought out… If it weren’t for that and his Aunt Eleanor working out a deal for her half section it would be extremely difficult. And that’s why so many small farms disappear.”

“We’re probably the last generation that owns the bulk of their land,” says Bryan Noble. Meanwhile, few farm family offspring want to stay.

Andrea and Michael worked the 2017 fall harvest and Charles joined in for just four days. Despite an early-season drought, it was successful. “In some instances,” Bryan says, “the crops made do with what was there and in other instances because of the date of seeding they hung on long enough to catch a few showers in mid-August that made all the difference in the world.”

Their soft-wheat yield was about 115 bushels per acre—notably some of their land is irrigated. By comparison, this was just over double their grandfather’s 1916 yield of 54 bushels per acre of hard red wheat, a different strain, and on only dry land. This year the Nobles’ full harvest included spring wheat, durum wheat, canola, peas and lentils. “It was truly amazing,” Bryan says.

This farming business is a complex of unsparing factors and tests of resolve. But there are also unexpected exhilarating moments in this deep connection with nature. Carol tells of the time when Bryan came in and spoke tenderly to her about the tiny baby deer he saw lying in the open field after its mother, frightened by the tractor, had run away. Bryan jumped off his machine to pick up the fawn. Carol speaks for Bryan, who seems to be re-experiencing the emotion of that moment. “He said he held it in his arms and felt its softness, and then moved it to shelter. Bryan loves animals.”

Or there’s Charles’s story of working all night combining in the dark, spurred in anticipation of rain. “We’d finished the field and I remember driving home thinking oh, it can rain now. And the sun was coming up and I was going by the lake and it was all quite sublime. And of course it
didn’t rain!”

Wheat plants warmed like sun rays
coming back at the sun,
wormed up under my eyelids
so that the tight grey drooled down
where the swather reel flapped it up dry
with the chaff particles floating
over the separate thin fingers of the field.

From “On A Clear Day Night Rounds Them Up” in Afternoon Starlight

With luck, these fields, tended with care for decades, will continue to produce in the hands of Noble generations to come.

 Steven Ross Smith is a sound poet, fiction writer, arts journalist and arts activist, best known for his fluttertongue poems.

____________________________________________

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The post Deep in the Furrows appeared first on Alberta Views.

Bill 6, the Enhanced Protection for Farm and Ranch Workers Act, extended the reach of a number of statutes in Alberta to include the formerly excluded farming and ranching industry. Previously, agricultural workers were exempt from the Employment Standards Code (e.g., minimum wage and paid vacations), the Labour Relations Code (e.g., the right to organize a union), the Occupational Health and Safety Act (review of injuries, accidents and deaths) and the Workers’ Compensation Act (mandatory WCB coverage). In its initial form, Bill 6 placed the 52,000 workers on Alberta’s 41,000 farms and ranches in an identical position to those in other industries in the province.

The labour minister at the time, Lori Sigurdson, announced Bill 6 at a press conference on a grain farm near Gibbons on November 18, 2015. The bill meant farmers would be expected to follow basic occupational health and safety codes, she said, adding that Alberta was the only province that didn’t already apply such laws. In Alberta a worker is more likely to get injured on a farm than at any other jobsite. Farms are also where an Alberta worker is most likely to die. Over the past 30 years, 368 Albertans died while working on a farm—70 of them children. Prior to the bill’s passage, farm and ranch workers had few protections. If they were injured on the job, they were entitled to no compensation from the government or their employer. Provincial investigators were unable to go onto farms to investigate serious injuries, death or unsafe work practices.

On the face of it, Bill 6 seemed sensible and just. The response, however, was fast and furious. In only a few days over 10,000 individuals signed a petition against the bill and 35,000 joined a Facebook group condemning the legislation. Multiple protests were held at the Alberta Legislature that November and December. No one in government seemed to anticipate that the legislation would ignite such a reaction from the province’s farmers.

The way the government presented it made it seem to a lot of people that farmers aren’t safe and don’t practise safe conduct, which is far from the truth.” —Erna Ference, chicken farmer

The backlash during the bill’s rollout was fuelled in part by a huge distrust of the newly elected NDP, which has an urban base. “We were caught off guard,” says Erna Ference, a chicken producer who farms with her husband near Black Diamond. “The way the government presented it made it seem to a lot of people that farmers aren’t safe and don’t practise safe conduct, which is far from the truth.”

Ference, who is also the chair of the Alberta Chicken Producers, says the previous government had been working towards a farm safety program with farmers and were consulting about occupational health and safety and workers’ compensation coverage. “We thought we were consulting, and all of a sudden, we weren’t. It was just announced,” she says. “We wanted to let the system work its way through, the way we were going about it—a little more cost-effective than the way the NDP went.”

Many farmers, unaware that the PC government had been working on improving farmworker pro-tections, felt they hadn’t been consulted and the legislation had been rammed down their throat.

Panicking, the government made mistakes. No senior officials attended the first town hall meeting in Grande Prairie, only government staff, which upset farmers. Afterwards Sigurdson and Agriculture and Forestry Minister Oneil Carlier attended several meetings.

But the major mistake the government made was creating the impression that family farms were the target of Bill 6. Many farmers feared the new legislation would take away their way of life by “destroying” the family farm. They worried their children wouldn’t be allowed to do chores or help out at all. They were concerned that neighbours volunteering would have to be covered by workers’ compensation. Alberta’s WCB website indicated that the bill would indeed require WCB coverage for family members and volunteers on farms and ranches. But the province soon announced that the legislation would apply only to paid employees—not neighbours, family or friends. On December 10, 2015, this was formalized through amendments to Bill 6. “They did listen to us, and that was good,” says Ference. “They exempted family farms.”

Nonetheless many farmers still had problems with mandatory WCB coverage of paid workers, arguing that private insurance was often a better option. Wayne Drysdale, MLA for Grande Prairie-Wapiti and opposition agriculture critic, has said many producers remain unhappy about being forced to take on WCB coverage because they viewed the private insurance they previously held as more comprehensive and cheaper. Some farmers argued that Bill 6 was “labour legislation disguised as farm safety legislation,” and that labour laws don’t fit the realities of farm life. During harvest season, for example, farmers can work 18-hour days. Rules about maximum hours don’t apply.

The Wildrose party, Rebel Media and Jason Kenney, among other critics of the NDP, didn’t do anything to dispel farmers’ fear. Rather, they stoked it with incendiary speeches and appearances at rallies. “Some people at the town halls were issuing death threats,” says Glenn Norman, a representative for the National Farmers Union. Norman lives in Red Deer County and raises cattle and custom hay. His organization supported Bill 6 from the beginning and he attended the town halls in both Red Deer and Olds.

“Rebel Media was a disinform-ation service,” he says. “They really stirred things up. And the Wildrose and the PCs were shadow influencers. At one meeting I was at, somebody wanted their Wildrose MLA to speak. Why would you [give mic time] to someone who has the opportunity to speak in the Legislature when there are actual farmers trying to figure out what is
going on?”

The Bill 6 discussion brought the Alberta farming community together. To voice their concerns as one unit, 29 of the province’s commodity organizations, including large groups such as the Alberta Beef Producers and the Alberta Wheat Commission, formed the AgCoalition. Kent Erickson, former chair of the Alberta Wheat Commission, became one of the organization’s co-chairs.

Erickson says the province didn’t realize the initial legislation would be problematic. Part of this had to do with the nature of farmers and ranchers, he says, who tend to be independent and work alone. “I think the government put our industry into a corner. It’s like a badger. If you put its back into a corner, it’s going to fight,” he says.

Farmers tend to treat their workers like family, he says. And many farmers resented the idea that the government was trying to interfere in their business. “It was an ideological difference: a left-wing opinion on workers’ rights versus a right-wing opinion,” he says.

It wasn’t a good fight, because we didn’t have their perspective and they didn’t have ours.” —Kent Erickson, grain farmer, former co-chair of the AGCoalition

Erickson, who operates a grain farm near Irma, says the farming community did need a push to get the ball rolling on improving farm worker safety but felt the government pushed too hard. He was also concerned because the new government didn’t seem to have a lot of agricultural background in its caucus. “Their viewpoint was coming from unions and worker collectivization, from that side,” he says. “They had very little understanding of how farmers work and how diverse we are, and where our perspective was coming from.

“It wasn’t a good fight,” he acknowledges, “because we didn’t have their perspective and they didn’t have ours.”

The AgCoalition’s role was to communicate with the government and ensure a more meaningful discussion. The group continued to speak out about Bill 6, and more recently formed a non-profit society, AgSafe Alberta, whose consultants go out and help farmers create safety plans for their farms at no cost. The group met with Sigurdson and her deputy ministers and had what Erickson calls a good dialogue.

“Maybe we didn’t agree with the government—but at least we were able to have a relationship with this government,” he says.

Carlier admits the province’s communication could have been better, but says he’s still proud of what his government has accomplished so far. “We had the opportunity to introduce legislation that existed in other provinces [and] that gives another measure of safety to farm workers,” he says. “Farmers and ranchers want their places to be safe anyway. This gives them another tool in the toolbox.”

The bill came into effect on January 1, 2016. The provincial government announced it would create technical working groups to consult on the regulations that would comprise the specifics of Bill 6. Members of the farming community and labour experts were asked to apply to sit on one of six panels and the government chose the groups’ memberships.

Barb McKinley, a consultant who runs a business called The Worker’s Advocate, put her name forward following a recommendation from the Alberta Federation of Labour and the Steelworkers’ Union. McKinley, who lives in Edmonton, grew up on a family farm in southern Alberta and still has relatives in the cattle business. She sat on Technical Working Group 3, which met from March 2016 until January 2017 with a mandate to review existing health-related requirements in the Occupational Health and Safety Code as they apply to farms and ranches. The process involved a number of meetings with stakeholders from different groups. McKinley, who helps injured workers negotiate with the Workers’ Compensation Board, said there was still a lot of misinformation and mistrust on her panel when the process started.

“A lot of people thought that occupational health and safety inspectors were going to turn up on their farms unannounced and demand to see their hazard assessments and inspect everything,” she says. “They didn’t realize that that’s not at all how occupational health and safety operates.”

According to McKinley, the department emphasizes education and compliance rather than a punitive approach. A lot of work had to be done to make the farming community understand the process.

She thinks the process and changes were long overdue. “Farming and ranching are some of the most dangerous occupations, and family farms can be quite dangerous in terms of children and people working alone,” she says. “It’s long overdue to include the agricultural sector on the same playing field as the rest of Alberta’s industries.”

Once I understood things a little better, I changed my mind. That was one of the things about the technical working groups. I learned a lot.” —Barb Mckinley, The Worker’s Advocate

The process of consultation was useful, she says. Since many of the farmers in her group were industry representatives, they went back to their commissions and stakeholders and explained what the new legislation would look like. This helped calm people down. McKinley and her group found that many of the existing safety codes applied quite naturally to agriculture. Many of the big producers, for example, including hog producers and cattle producers, were already doing many of the things the safety code mandated. “I don’t think it’s a huge imposition on the sector,” she says.

Her group dealt with rules about how farmers can store fuel, enter confined spaces and deal with grain bins. As a labour representative, she feels like she learned a lot from the farmers and suggests they learned a lot from her too. “Once I understood things a little better, I changed my mind about my position,” McKinley says. “That was one of the things about the technical working groups. I learned a lot.”

Eric Musekamp, who operates a group called the “Farmworker’s Union,” was also involved in the process. He sat on the Health and Safety Education technical working group.

Musekamp, who lives near Medicine Hat, was a farmworker for 25 years and had been ostracized for his views. He and his wife, Darlene Dunlop, formed their non-profit society with the mandate to lobby for farmworkers. The group was prohibited from creating an official union, but met and consulted with farmworkers who had been injured.

Musekamp started the Farmworker’s Union in 2004 in order to lobby the government to treat farmworkers equally to others under the Charter. He was motivated, he says, by the death of a fellow worker. On August 20, 1999, Terry Rash had tipped an old truck into a ditch in Taber. Farm owner Charles Beauchamp took a knife and slashed the 52-year-old farmworker to death.

“I was a few farms over from Terry and I didn’t know him,” says Musekamp. “But news of his killing swept through the hired-man community. What really got it going was that when Beauchamp went to trial, he plea bargained and ultimately got a recommendation from the sentencing judge for him to be considered for early release, because of the embarrassment of being caught killing your hired man. You couldn’t kill a dog and get that kind of sentence.”

Musekamp felt shock and horror about the incident—and that’s when he discovered farmworkers in Alberta were exempt from all normal workplace standards that the rest of Canada enjoys.

On his Facebook page, Musekamp continues to get abuse and vitriol, including death threats. The trailer he lives in has been vandalized. Yet Musekamp hasn’t backed down from his position. He’s a supporter of Bill 6. He and his wife have been calling for workers’ rights for years.

Musekamp believes Bill 6 is starting to shift the culture in agriculture. “Employers are putting more thought into the way they treat their workers and are treating them more equitably,” he says. Yet even as employers are expected to provide workers’ compensation, Musekamp has still heard of workers who’ve been asked by their employers not to claim it. He also knows of some workers who were not aware that they have coverage.

Since January 1, 2016, compensation claims for injured farmworkers in Alberta have more than doubled. In 2016 there were 793 claims, compared to 339 the year before. This increase was expected, because more people were covered and more people were reporting injuries. The legislation effectively protects both the farmer and the worker, since under workers’ compensation, employees can’t sue their employers. Now, if a worker is injured on a farm, the employer may only need to pay higher rates.

Don Voaklander, director of the Injury Prevention Centre at the University of Alberta, collects fatality data from farms across the country. He was involved in the Best Practices technical working group, and says that while more workers’ compensation claims were expected, it will be a long time before anyone knows if Bill 6 has brought down the rate of farm injuries. It might, he says, but if so, the difference could be slight, since an estimated 65 per cent of Alberta’s work-related fatalities occur on family farms.

“Farming is still going to be a risky endeavour with Bill 6,” he says. “What it does is give paid employees the equality of other paid employees in Alberta.”

His group recommended rollover protective structures on tractors and other changes related to specific farm machinery. The recommendations eventually adopted are similar to standards used in BC, which, Voaklander says, is the Canadian leader in regulations and best practices for farms. “Most provinces don’t have anything specific to farms. I think Alberta was trying to emulate what BC had done and make it as workable as possible,” he says.

He believes Bill 6 was sorely needed. “I don’t think you can have a second class of worker not protected by Occupational Health and Safety or covered by WCB. Alberta was the last to the table for any of these regulations.”

He adds, “Previously, I wouldn’t have told my kids to work on a farm.”

The changes will be less burdensome than the farming community feared, Voaklander says, because two-thirds of farmers in Alberta don’t have employees. Meanwhile, he adds, a safer operation can be more competitive.

Alberta is about the middle of the road in comparison with other provinces in terms of farm accidents. However, the province does have more child deaths compared to other parts of the country. About three or four children die in Alberta in farm accidents every year.

“It’s been a modest increase for a few years, so that’s a bit of a worry,” says Voaklander. Carlier hopes the discussions of the bill have raised awareness about public safety, even on farms and in work situations not covered by Bill 6.

The recommendations of the technical working groups were available online and open to public comment until February 26, 2018. They will eventually inform subsequent laws. Carlier hasn’t announced a date for new regulations. Albertans such as Erna Ference wonder how many of the recommendations the government will actually consider.

“On any type of regulation, there may be some changes,” she says. “It will be a living document, with continuous input from experts in the field—and that’s farmers and ranchers themselves.”

In the meantime Jason Kenney, the leader of the United Conservative Party, has launched a campaign opposing Bill 6. Kenney, who refused interviews for this story, has an active campaign page called “Deep-Six Bill 6,” which vows to repeal the bill if he becomes premier. That’s a move many think would be a waste of time—including Ference.

“A lot of good work has been done,” she says. “I think the bill could be revisited. But to throw it out, when we’ve come so far in so many ways… It just doesn’t make sense.”

“Jason Kenney’s promise to repeal Bill 6 would be a whole step back,” agrees Barb McKinley. She says labour and farmers and government have built bridges, and Kenney would tear those down. “There’s no reason for that other than cheap politicking.”

“Taking a class of worker and saying ‘You don’t have the same rights and protections that other workers do’—where’s the logic in that How can you justify that legally, morally or ethically?”

Alexis Kienlen is a reporter for Alberta Farmer. Originally from Saskatoon, she now lives in Edmonton.

The post Beyond Bill 6 appeared first on Alberta Views.

With lower revenues and a growing budget deficit, how could the province possibly hope to meet public employees’ demands Now add a new wrinkle in the form of a 2015 Supreme Court decision granting all of these workers the legal right to strike. David Harrigan, director of labour relations for the UNA and a negotiator with 38 years of experience, summed it all up in five words: “A recipe for massive disaster.”

Given such considerations, what’s the best way for our government to make agreements with the teachers, nurses, laboratory staff and other workers who provide us, the citizens, with services and get paid with our taxes Perhaps it’s best to threaten them and call them overpaid, underworked and unproductive. And then, once they’re really trembling, to extract the maximum cuts to pay and staff. That’s actually a pretty standard approach. But what if instead our government sat down with public servants as valued employees and had mutually well-informed discussions about what’s desirable and possible with respect to working conditions and pay?

Rachel Notley’s government, facing a record number of public-sector negotiations and other unique pressures, decided to begin with a respectful approach. It’s fascinating to see how far their process differed from the contempt Albertans had grown accustomed to over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, it’s becoming clear what this has achieved for Albertans in lower costs and labour peace.

Even as negotiations slowly progressed in 2017, some commentators pined for the old methods. In February the Calgary Herald editorial board seemed to speak against even a pretense of good-faith bargaining: “The problem with pretending that the bargaining process should be allowed to play out [my italics] is there’s a likelihood that public wages will increase.” Sounds like asking for a return to the Ralph Klein era.

What was bargaining like back then As a thought experiment, let’s cue the time-travel effects. Picture some calendar page flipping, some newspaper front page spinning—presto, it’s 1997. Klein was re-elected as premier in March, having imposed 20 per cent cuts to spending during his first mandate. Reader, I was there. With the board of The University of Calgary Faculty Association (TUCFA), I helped bargain with a government whose cupboard wasn’t simply bare—it was only 4/5 its former size. A 21 per cent cut from post-secondary budgets meant we sure weren’t bargaining for a pay raise.

“Both sides are taking labour relations seriously, rather than seeing who blinks first.” —David Harrigan, UNA

Wait, though—what else do unions bargain for Anyone who hasn’t worked in a job with collective bargaining might well ask this question. The answer: every aspect of working conditions and every kind of employee benefit can be part of a union negotiation. So plenty is left to discuss, from overtime rules to how duties get assigned to parental leave or care for sick family. (If you’ve ever wondered why negotiations can seem to drag on forever, here’s one big reason. Each side brings a wish list that involves so much more than wages, and each item has to be haggled over and then taken “home” to the government or the union to see what’s acceptable. Then another round of discussion can begin, and so on for each item on the wish list. When meetings can take place only every few weeks, you see how the process can last a year or more.)

Even the simple questions “Who’s in this bargaining unit Who benefits from whatever gets negotiated?” can prove to be major issues. That’s why back in the 1990s TUCFA, though stalled on pay, aimed to enlarge the membership. “Sessionals,” or contract-based teachers, became members of TUCFA for the first time. We requested very basic things for them, like access to phones, mailboxes and space to meet students. We sought recognition for instructors who had taught, sometimes for decades, without benefits, job continuity or a decent fraction of a full-time salary. From that abject position, we slowly negotiated a career path from professor-on-contract to continuing faculty member. All worthy accomplishments. So yes, extremely valuable things can be accomplished in any negotiation, no matter the employer’s fiscal situation.

Still, it’s painful to recall how dire the atmosphere was back then, how poisoned by persistent ideological bullying. Public-sector workers were demonized by the government as inefficient and overpaid: a “cost centre.” Everything we did, we were told, could be done better and more cheaply by for-profit replacements. These were and are mostly yet to be invented, but in the education world, one was real: the for-profit DeVry Institute was a darling of the Klein government, which gave the school degree-granting status in 2001. (How did that turn out DeVry closed its Calgary campus in 2017 and in the US paid $100-million to settle lawsuits claiming they promoted false student success rates.)

Privatization and profit were supposed to solve every problem. I vividly remember a confrontation at one of the many, many focus groups, round-table discussions and so on which sucked up all the air in the 1990s. The gist of these sessions was that public-sector workers—in my case, professors—would meet with private sector “stakeholders” who, through some unspecified contagion mechanism, would transmit their innovativeness and entrepreneurialism to us inefficient socialists. The entrepreneurs at these events were civic-minded people, donating their time. But this one day, I was being lectured by someone about how public universities shared the defects of public libraries. These were a dumb kind of thing, because “a library is just like a bookstore, it’s a place to get books. Except a bookstore has a business plan, and a library just picks the taxpayer’s pocket.”

Instead of taking to heart the obvious lessons for universities—Privatize! Monetize!—I ranted about how utterly different the mandates of bookstores and public libraries actually are. Bookstores: they stock popular things, don’t waste space on slow sellers, serve clients who have money. Public libraries: they serve a wide (even destitute) public, keep everything available in case the need arises, function as a collective repository of knowledge for the community. The public-interest perspective fell on deaf ears; a rigidly market-based view of society was relentlessly pressed at these sessions.

Even after Klein, public-sector bargaining was difficult. The refusal to see unions as legitimate partners hampered efforts at reasonable conversation. Witness the debacle of Bill 46: The Public Service Salary Restraint Act, which wage-freeze bill was deemed illegal and was suspended by a court injunction in February 2014. Then-premier Alison Redford resigned shortly afterward, and in April the affected AUPE members were offered a 6.75 per cent salary increase over three years, plus a lump sum. This agreement (a deal lots of Albertans at the time might have pronounced “not too shabby”) is one of the many that expired in 2017.

“The government was firm but fair in its approach. Its expectations were clear.” —ATA president Greg Jeffery

The negotiations of 2017 couldn’t have been more different from those of 1997. Yes, low revenues created pressure, but both parties now shared a crucial underlying consensus. Alvin Finkel, professor emeritus of history at Athabasca University, explains this key point: “The NDP is more sympathetic to the notion of governments actually doing things, while more-conservative parties see anything governments do apart from protecting property and putting certain people in prison as unnecessary and undesirable. For the NDP, some services—like health and education—are not commodities, and they’re not willing to leave them to the goodwill of the private sector.” Today, Albertans in these public-sector jobs are not seen as expensive parasites but as helpful partners in work that governments must do.

Hence the new approach. It began, in the view of Bob Barnetson, professor of labour relations at Athabasca University, by emphasizing “respect, not laying anyone off—basically the opposite of every PC negotiation, which was more of a lesson in how not to proceed.” The new tone was more pragmatic and informed than Albertans have seen for decades. A controversial decision to hire Kevin Davediuk, a former staff negotiator for the AUPE, as the government’s own “chief adviser on negotiations” played a role here. Then-Wildrose MLA Derek Fildebrandt deployed the “fox guarding the henhouse” cliché to describe Davediuk’s appointment. Finance Minister Joe Ceci countered by stressing Davediuk’s expertise as “somebody who has the respect of both sides of the table, is known as a fair negotiator and who can help us bend the curve on expenses.” As Barnetson explains, putting an insider like Davediuk at the helm meant “there were no secrets on either side.”

The “no secrets, everybody working together” method laid the foundation for the epic bargaining of 2017. With the ATA, the innovative NDP strategy was to negotiate an umbrella agreement with all 61 bargaining units instead of dealing with individual school boards. This was a “let’s get real” approach, in the sense that government has always been a virtual presence in such negotiations—after all, they pay the bills. Passing Bill 8 to create a single Teachers’ Employer Bargaining Association simply made this presence formal and explicit. As ATA president Greg Jeffery explains the process, “Some matters were bargained at a central table that included government and school board representatives and others were bargained at local tables… The government representatives were fair but firm in their approach. They were clear with their expectation that negotiations would not result in
salary increases.”

The teachers’ settlement was a start, but it didn’t guarantee ongoing labour peace. The deal included a much discussed “me-too clause” (unfortunately named before Harvey Weinstein’s disgrace prompted the Twitter hashtag #MeToo), which made the ATA’s acceptance of 0 per cent salary increases conditional upon later public-sector agreements. As Barnetson pointed out to the Edmonton Journal, such terms indicated a low level of initial trust between the parties because the teachers “didn’t want to get screwed by signing early and have someone else negotiate a better deal.”

For nurses at least, any deal at all was slow to emerge. In late 2017 the UNA’s David Harrigan said no one was “phoning me up to say, ‘What can I offer you today?’” Still, Harrigan saw the more direct involvement of government—just as in the ATA process—as a highly positive step: previously “there’d never been a representative of government right there at the table.” The new approach he saw involves “taking labour relations seriously, rather than hammering down and waiting to see who blinks first.” Creating a respectful tone is not limited to bargaining-table actions. Notley was, in 2016, the first Alberta premier ever to address an annual general meeting of the UNA. What better way to say “We’re allies, not enemies.”

Despite this, by September the UNA had made only slow progress. Their priorities were to achieve a three-year agreement, without layoffs, and to clarify staffing issues (for example ensuring that registered nurses or RPNs are in charge of each unit). In fall 2017 they agreed to voluntary external mediation. Harrigan saw this as an encouraging sign, however: “If this were the old PC party, they wouldn’t be taking this approach, and one result might have been increased threats of job action.”

The nurses’ patience paid off by February 2018, as almost 90 per cent of the UNA membership ratified a three-year collective agreement. The deal sees no wage increases for two years but has a proviso to renegotiate in year three. Better job security and non-salary clauses balance the deal.

Like the UNA, the HSAA went to mediation in late 2017. February saw a tentative agreement, again with two years of zero salary growth, offset by what HSAA president Mike Parker called “real improvements to work–life balance issues.” At time of writing, this deal had not been ratified by HSAA members.

But while the NDP has established a promising trend, a definitive conclusion is hard to make—especially while the 90,000-member AUPE has yet to reach agreement. A late 2017 bargaining bulletin for several government services locals wasn’t promising: “…agreement on many of the [AUPE’s] priority items, like job security, workload, job classifications, hiring practices, contracting out and more, have yet to be seriously discussed and are tied to a monetary agreement.”

Negotiations between the Notley government and public sector workers have demonstrated increased respect, trust and mutual understanding. But these conditions may still be fragile. Late last year the government began to speak of “compassionate belt-tightening.” Finance Minister Joe Ceci, following his November economic statement, was accused of bargaining through the media when he said he hoped all unions would follow the ATA’s example and accept a voluntary (i.e., not imposed) two-year wage freeze. AUPE president Guy Smith quickly responded that this “damages the relationship at the table.” To request a wage freeze is not to impose one, and yet the HSAA, too, quickly voiced displeasure. Parker tweeted in November that “the finance minister pledged to both protect front-line services and impose a hiring freeze. These two actions are incompatible.”

But both the government and public-sector unions need to see the process work. Though stagnant salaries are no fun, a UCP win in the next provincial election could mean cuts. Finkel suggests public-sector workers “don’t want what the UCP is promising. This is a party led by a guy that came out of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.” Jason Kenney hasn’t announced a specific plan to reduce the public-sector wage bill but has promised “a period of sustained fiscal restraint.” In this context, Finkel says, it’s strategic for unions to think “short-term and long-term, and to see the danger that high wage settlements could lead to anger, which could lead to a UCP victory.” Neither side wants to push the other too far and risk confirming clichéd narratives that NDP governments, by their nature, “give away the store” to unions.

“Our agreement brings real improvements to work–life balance issues.” —HSAA president Mike Parker

Meanwhile, in its mostly low-drama way, the NDP has quietly done things that a conservative party would be publicizing as cost-slashing victories. Public-sector costs are being cut simply through attrition: when workers leave or retire, “replacement is very slow, or does not happen at all. With turnover, this can save 10 per cent in salary costs—but that’s not a well you can go to endlessly,” says Barnetson, citing risks of staff burnout and low morale. These are the very issues raised in response to Klein’s 1990s cuts and mentioned again more recently by the HSAA.

Public-sector workers and the government began 2018 with much unresolved. What difference will the outcome of ongoing negotiations make to Alberta’s general public Ask the residents of Cold Lake, whose senior-care home Points West Living faced a strike from December 2016 into the summer of 2017. This was an action by private-sector workers, though both the AUPE and HSAA sent pickets in support. Any strike by teachers, nurses or government workers would similarly affect Albertans with kids, with health concerns or who use any kind of government services—in other words, you, me and everybody.

Short of a strike, less drastic job actions such as work-to-rule could discredit the Notley government where it hurts most. Kenney must pray each night that this happens. But if, on the other hand, the NDP maintains both labour peace and demonstrably reduces public-sector costs—a goal that seems increasingly achievable—they’ll be able to claim that an NDP government is not inevitably “hostage to labour” but instead uses its knowledge of unions and respect for them to serve the broader public interest.

For Notley’s government, the stakes couldn’t be higher if they hope for a second mandate. It’s telling that instead of complaining about public-sector costs, as our government did in the old days, they’re defending public servants in the strongest terms, to audiences that might once have called for cutbacks. Notley’s December 7, 2017, speech to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce described Alberta’s public-sector workers as “the best in the country” and also “some of your best customers.” The speech asserted the value of unionized public servants in a diverse economy. It received a standing ovation from a business audience. That’s a significant shift.

While Alberta might not yet be “Rachel’s World,” the government’s efforts to create a more constructive relationship with public-sector workers is one important step in leaving “Ralph’s World” behind.

Harry Vandervlist is a long-time contributor to Alberta Views. He teaches English and Canadian literature at the U of C.

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