The post September 8-12, 2025 appeared first on Alberta Views.

The post September 1-5, 2025 appeared first on Alberta Views.

The post May 26–30, 2025 appeared first on Alberta Views.

The post May 12–16, 2025 appeared first on Alberta Views.

The post April 14–18, 2025 appeared first on Alberta Views.

The post April 7–11, 2025 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.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

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

Caylan Ford says yes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Mindzak says no

Assistant professor for the Faculty of Education at Brock University

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

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

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

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

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

Caylan Ford responds to Michael Mindzak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Mindzak responds to Caylan Ford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Should Alberta Have Charter Schools? 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).

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

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

A few of us got together for a meeting. Everybody had the same issues; serious problems like seniority, where newer staff were regularly given more shifts than senior workers. Hours were especially crucial: benefits were cut off if you didn’t have enough hours. My husband had suffered a heart attack, and my benefits were the main reason I even stayed on at Red Lobster. I was just about to lose them—maybe another week, and I’d have lost my benefits.

And there were deeper problems. Staff had faced discrimination. Body-shaming, if you were a little bit overweight, if you were Asian. Two previous GMs had been like this, and the new one was no better. If he didn’t like you, for whatever reason, you were pushed aside.

It was all going downhill. We’d reached out to head office a couple of times. No response. At that meeting we agreed: We needed representation for us as employees.

When my co-workers and I first reached out to the United Food and Commercial Workers, we didn’t know what to expect. We’d heard that organizing a restaurant chain is tough, with workers often moving between jobs. We’d heard about Walmart, about other places that had gone through union drives, about how hard it was. I had my own concerns. What if this didn’t go through: Would I lose my job But UFCW Local 401 organizer Catherine Lelis helped a lot. She was comforting. She said, “If you guys work as a team, it can be done.” She gave us information we didn’t have, because most of us were doing this for the first time.

Enough of us signed union cards, and we were automatically certified. No secret vote needed.

When it came out that I was helping to organize the Red Lobster, I got a lot of support from co-workers. People came up to me, saying, “I’m so proud of you. I’m so happy you’re here. We’re standing behind you. We all need this!”  That made me think we could do this. I wasn’t alone. My co-workers wanted this even more than I did!

But not everything was smooth. Support for unionization was solid among front-end workers such as servers, but the kitchen staff received a lot of misinformation from management: that the union was bad; the restaurant would close; they’d lose their jobs; they’d pay too much in union dues; they wouldn’t get tips, all that stuff. Front-end workers rallied; we came to kitchen staff and focused on personal relationships.

We found strength in each other. Some days I’d be really down, then a co-worker would say “Kareen, we can do this!” Then she’d run, run, run. The next month she’d go, “This isn’t going to work,” and the next worker would take up the cause. Between three of us we did it together.

Eventually enough of us signed union cards, and we were automatically certified. No secret vote needed. The Notley government had brought in a law making it fairer for workers trying to unionize.

We workers are now in mediation, trying to get a collective agreement. I’m one of three members of the bargaining team sitting across from our corporate bosses. Bargaining is hard, and I’ve found it very frustrating how far the company will go to fight even about non-monetary issues.

But though we’ve been threatened, none of us have lost our jobs as a result of the union drive. The restaurant’s doing as well as ever, and remains quite profitable. There was one job loss, though—the manager at the time we were inspired to organize. He’s gone.

The post Organizing a Workplace Union appeared first on Alberta Views.