SAINTS PRESERVE US

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Fifty-one thousand members of the Alberta Teachers’ Association (and it better know how to employ a plural apostrophe) walked off the job October 6. The action directly impacted 2500 schools (public, separate and francophone) across the province. The 700,000 students affected range from kindergarten level to grade 12. These kids will play truant until Halloween at the least. Alberta’s United Conservative government intends to pass back-to-work legislation October 27. Five million people live in Alberta.

Strikes (and lockouts) are always the result of frustration, months of fruitless negotiation. The issues no longer up for discussion won’t come as a shock to anyone who pays a modicum of attention to the provincial education system. The ATA’s litany of complaint is D, “all of the above” on a multiple-choice exam. Classrooms are overcrowded. The hard cap headcount is ever-rising as teachers’ resources and secondary supports diminish proportionally. There are money matters too. Nobody has ever held a job without hidden duties, mystery tasks unhighlighted by bullet points in its official description. Implicit in any labour contract is that unpaid work should amount to a mere fraction of salaried requirements. Should Alberta’s teachers be paying for their students’ school supplies from their own underfunded pockets?

The UCP excels at conjuring issues outside of its jurisdiction and then offering solutions as veiled threats to other levels of government. But extortion’s not an option on its own mismanaged turf. The big news of late is the government’s launch of a sort of sports bracket in which Albertans can pick their favourites from an array of new license plate designs. Participatory democracy with no petition required! Meanwhile, the health file languishes despite being overseen by four (FOUR!) ministers. As for the education ministry…

The fuse for this fiasco was sparked last summer when the education ministry issued a diktat listing 200 books it deemed unsuitable for tender, social media-addicted eyes. Margaret Atwood and Aldous Huxley, authors I read for courses when I was in high school, made the Fahrenheit 451 cut. What really set the ATA afire though was the supplementary demand that all teachers list the books at hand in their classrooms for official vetting. Documenting out-of-pocket supplies and resources in July sounds an awful lot like an unpaid make-work exercise. 

Strikes always come with ripples, whether direct or indirect. Canada Post is in the midst of yet another labour disruption. A few chronic magazine subscribers aside, nobody’s noticed. Or they didn’t in Edmonton and Calgary until the October 20 civic elections. No eligible voter intent on exercising their democratic privilege had an Edmonton Elections or Elections Calgary registration card. They were impossible to get because they were impossible to distribute. The lines in school gyms were long and snaky. Reams of paperwork for voters to fill out and who were never taught cursive. To be fair to the grossly mismanaged Crown taxpayer-funded sinkhole, delays were exacerbated by the UCP’s ministry of municipal affairs needless MAGA tinkering with the simple mechanics of an unbroken system. Alberta in all her embarrassing majesty.

The greatest resource of any society is its youth. Educated people are smarter than morons; for the most part, all things considered, that’s a logical sweeping generalization. Nothing else to infer here. There are students looking toward provincial exams (necessarily optional now), graduation and university admission. Their education path zigged and zagged during the pandemic. This additional weeks-long gap (and counting) is not insignificant.

Covid fostered the myth of remote work as an employee’s right. An imaginary labour code clause which most workers are unable to exercise. Younger students at loose ends require supervision. Across every sector of the economy, from doctors to retail clerks, people are staying away from their jobs. They’re at home trying to remember the rules of grammar and work out fractions the other three-eighths of the time.

The government of Alberta spends $5-million per annum supporting charter schools. Private institutions outside of the public system. They should fund themselves given their exorbitant fees. One example is Waldorf School where female teachers are obligated to wear modest clothing underneath a concealing apron. Apparently, graduates, or maybe just the valedictorians, could possibly possess the ability to walk through walls because everything is made of atoms. There’s a hockey-focused academy in town, but the rest are mostly Christian of that peculiar evangelical MAGA variety.

A percentage of the students affected by the impasse will be eligible voters in the next provincial election which is scheduled for 2027. Though public memory is notoriously short, perhaps the brighter ones have been taking notes during their downtime.

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