Alberta teachers give strike notice, province says it wants to avoid job action

More than 51,000 teachers in Alberta will strike starting Oct. 6 if an agreement is not reached before then.

It comes after months of stalled negotiations with the province, Jason Schilling, president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, said Wednesday.

Oct. 6 is one day before the 120-day strike vote validity expires.

Students are being shortchanged and our teachers are being pushed to the brink. Without bold, immediate and sustained intervention from the government, the situation will deteriorate further, Schilling said.

The time of half measures and political deflection is over. Our kids deserve better and so do the people who teach them.

Some boards, including Edmonton Public Schools, have started reaching out to parents.

In a statement issued Wednesday, Alberta finance minister Nate Horner said the decision has cast a shadow of uncertainty and doubt over the start of the school year.

I am disappointed that the ATA is using the potential disruption of the school year as leverage in its pursuit of additional compensation. Announcing a strike commencing October 6 before the parties have resumed negotiations only serves to increase stress among Alberta’s students and families, it reads.

At an unrelated news conference, Premier Danielle Smith echoed that disappointment, as she thought the two sides were making great progress.

Schilling said he doesn’t see it that way.

We have teachers who are dealing with the largest classes that they’ve ever dealt with in their lives, he said.

We have students who are learning in libraries and hallways and boot rooms across this province. And so to say that we’re making progress … I don’t understand where that is coming from.

Smith said the government has the ability to give a 12 per cent pay raise over the course of four years. Any more than that would leave the province short money, something Smith says she isn’t willing to do.

Something’s got to give here, she said Wednesday.

If they just come back and say, ‘Give us more money,’ that’s not going to address the foundational issues we’re hearing from teachers.

Smith said she understands the issues to be foundationally about classroom size and complexity.

That gets solved by having more teachers in the classroom and more education assistants in the classroom, Smith said.

The last thing they put on the table of hiring 1,000 teachers per year for the next three years, we agreed to.

According to provincial statistics, there were 91,000 more Alberta students enrolled in K-12 classes in September 2024 compared to four years earlier, bringing the student population to 825,817.

Schilling said adding those teachers is a start, but it doesn’t begin to meet the needs created by years of neglect and record enrolment growth.

Government is well within their financial capacity to meet the needs of teachers and they’ve given themselves a tight fiscal window, Schilling said.

Smith said she and her government hope to avoid a strike and are prepared to try and make progress on classroom conditions and getting more staff in the classroom.

How did we get here?

A contract dispute involving teachers this widespread last happened in 2002, when about 20,000 Alberta teachers went on strike because they were frustrated with large class sizes, lacklustre pay and the effect on teacher retention, said Larry Booi, the former ATA president who led educators in that strike, in an interview late last month.

With the goal of reining in spending to balance the budget, former premier Jason Kenney’s United Conservative government changed the school funding formula and structure of grants starting in 2020.

Five budget years followed where K-12 education funding from the province did not keep pace with the additional costs of inflation and growing enrolment.

Although the government has pointed to annual education budget increases — operating funding is nearly $9.9 billion this year — it is government policy that spending increases must be lower than the cumulative effects of inflation and population growth.

It has left Alberta students among the least funded in the country.

This article is republished from RCI.