The Alberta teacher strike is now in its second week, with 58 per cent of Albertans supporting teachers at the bargaining table, according to a new Angus Reid poll.
The strike comes after a fierce round of negotiations between the province and the public sector. Nearly 90 per cent of teachers voted against the province’s most recent offer of a 12 percent wage increase over four years, a commitment to hire 3,000 new teachers, and free COVID-19 vaccines.
Alberta’s education and finance ministers have stated that they do not have more than the $2.6 billion already on the table to offer teachers. They said teachers will need to decide during negotiations where they want this money to go – whether to address class size and composition, or to wage increases.
The government has pinned the strikes on the Alberta Teacher’s Association (ATA), saying at a press conference in August that “parents should be furious that union leaders are gambling with their kids’ future.”
However experts say that the government’s involvement in the negotiations and its approach to education funding have negatively impacted student learning and have increased the likelihood of a strike.
Government intervention makes strikes more likely
Historically, government worker strikes have been powerful and brought significant improvements for workers, says Susan Cake, associate professor of human resources and labour relations at Athabasca University.
“The public sector going on strike tends to have a large impact because they are providing services that the government has often deemed as essential and that the free market isn’t in a position to provide. So the disruption they cause tends to be on a larger scale,” she told TheRockies.Life in an interview.
Canadians have won maternity leave, better working conditions, and wage increases through strikes. Strikes have created cultural shifts and have pushed workplace innovations.
However in recent years the Alberta government has found ways to get around public sector workers’ rights to collective bargaining, Cake noted. The province may now dictate what kind of deals employers are allowed to make. Employers are also not allowed to talk about the mandates the government has given them, even after negotiations end.
In 2024, Cake and her colleagues predicted that this would lead to more escalation at the negotiating table, and as a result more strikes.
The recent teacher strike has been evidence of this. In September, the ATA issued a document saying the bargaining association negotiation on behalf of the province had not received a mandate to talk about class size and complexity. The province then took the ATA to court, saying that the association had misinformed parents and students. The government’s bargaining association could not correct the record on what they’d been mandated to negotiate, as doing so would be against the law.
“Rather than sitting down at the table and working towards a solution, the government is wasting time on legal manoeuvres,” ATA president Jason Schilling said of the lawsuit in a news conference.
The result is a strike that has pulled more than 750,000 students away from their studies.
Quality versus parental choice
To improve student learning, the government might also change how it manages education funding.
The province has made parental choice, rather than a quality education, the most important factor in education. Under their current logic, parents must be able to choose whether their child attends a public, private, or charter school, or whether the child is homeschooled. Funding per child is allocated evenly regardless of the choice made.
With choice at the center instead of quality, Albertans are positioned as “having power as consumers, not necessarily as citizens,” according to Cake.
Children’s education, she noted, does not act like a consumer good.
The current options presented to parents are deceptive. The majority of private schools are in Calgary, meaning parents in rural Alberta only have the choice of public education, and are missing out on the funds disproportionately given to private schools in more populated regions. Students with additional learning needs also do not have choice as normally it’s only the public sector that will admit them.
In focusing on a money-per-student model, governments are encouraged to try and stretch dollars farther by packing public classrooms. More students in a classroom means increased complexity and teacher workload.
The result is that parents have a choice only between an under-funded public system or privatized schools that only cater to certain students in select regions.
Invest in education, invest in people
Historically, Alberta had an education system to be proud of. The system has been studied across the world, and Albertan students have regularly rated the highest in Canada in reading, science, and mathematics.
However as a result of the province’s recent management of education, teachers are faced with increasingly crushing workloads. Students are crammed into classrooms that distract them from learning and limit their access to teacher support.
Improving school funding would not simply benefit teachers, Cake said. It would be “valuing people in the province, assessing the needs that they have and then investing in that.”
