Alberta's Provincial Priorities should be our kids

Four days until Alberta teachers strike: the clock is ticking.

Not all that long ago, I came to the conclusion that the Alberta’s future has been held hostage by a glitch that revolves almost solely around oil and gas. The first is that because of oil and gas, we tend to have higher wages generally. If someone who dropped out of high school can make $80,000/year working on the rigs, companies have to offer some incentive so that others might choose to get higher education and work elsewhere, or even use that higher education in a trade, engineering, and management to meet additional requirements in the oil and gas industry.

These higher wages have been a beacon to many from across the country. Add to that our lower cost of living due to lower government expenditures on services like building and staffing hospitals, long-term care, and schools, as well as consistently decreasing funding for staff and supplies to support a low tax environment, and our governments have consistently make Alberta appealing to those of working age — on their paycheques, anyway.

Secondly, a lot of people don’t stay. When they’re finished with the rat race, they return to their home provinces, or seek a change of pace in another. It’s kept our population’s average age at one of the lowest in Canada for almost 50 years.

That temporary status, I realized, has an incredible disadvantage for anyone who considers, or wants to consider, Alberta their “forever home”: there’s neither incentive nor will to invest in the province’s future.

In that way, it wasn’t simply government short-sightedness — I think a good number of leaders understood the predicament they were in — it’s a willful disregard on behalf of the voting public that successive governments who understand they could lose to complete incompetence with a party claiming a robotic “we will not raise your taxes” over having a commitment to actually benefit Albertans today as well as those who choose our province in the future.

There’s no more kicking the can down the road. Teachers have said they need action, not just promises to solve problems later.

The Alberta government knew they were going to go face-to-face with teachers in the spring.

Albertans became aware of this more broadly when school resumed last month.

The UCP can make announcements for future funding all they want but it doesn’t address issues today.

Teachers have been telling them there are issues today for months.

I don’t actually care if a lack of teachers are an issue in every other province because the government of Alberta is not responsible for other provinces.

My government, whether I voted for them or not, is responsible for this province. My government is responsible for the decisions they make today, and the decisions they made last month, and like it or not, the decisions made by their predecessors whether they were elected under the UCP banner or not.

If there’s a problem with what the NDP did, which was convince a lot of unions to accept wage freezes because of the oil price downturn, then it is this government’s job to fix it. If there’s a problem with what Jason Kenney did, which was refuse to fund education assistants and hand out education tax holidays for oil companies during the pandemic, then it is this government’s job to fix it.

I don’t give a damn who created the problem, it is this government’s problem to solve.

Our education system is in crisis.

I’m thrilled that Danielle Smith has promised $8 billion for new schools over the next decade — in ten years that will be fantastic — what is she going to do to fix out-of-control class sizes today?

It’s super that Danielle Smith has promised to ensure more funding for teachers over the next three years; over the next three years, that will be great. What is she going to do about the teacher shortage today?

Teachers told the government that they need more staff, they need more EAs, they need better resources in the classroom today. That is a problem that needs to be solved today.

You know how Danielle Smith came up with payments to parents for kids under 12 to help with childcare? That’s a solution — albeit to a problem her government created — that needed to be solved and they did it. It’s not impossible.

If the treasury needs to bring in more money to support the additional needs of Alberta students, then Danielle Smith’s government is responsible for solving that problem.

I know the libertarian-minded among us prefer to say it’s someone else’s problem but like it or not, this is Danielle Smith and the UCP’s problem. They have to come up with a solution because they’re the ones in government. They told Albertans they wanted the job, they got the votes from Albertans to get the job, now Albertans are demanding they do their damned job.

I stand with teachers.

I stand with teachers because my kid’s education is important.

I stand with teachers because we are counting on them to prepare our kids for the future.

The least we can do is demand our government gives them the resources to make that happen.

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