Is Alberta Facing a Back-to-School Teachers’ Strike?

There’s no way to suggest a 94.5-per-cent strike vote by nearly 39,000 Alberta teachers doesn’t represent a pretty solid negotiating mandate for their union.

Alberta Teachers’ Association president Jason Schilling announced the results of the vote, which took place between Thursday and Sunday, in an online news conference Tuesday, after which the ATA published a press release.

“By voting to strike, teachers are sending an unmistakable message: we are united, we are determined and we will no longer hold up a crumbling public education system,” the news release said.

At the news conference, Schilling several times emphasized that Alberta now has the lowest per-student education funding of any Canadian province. (Figures from Statistics Canada from the 2022-23 school year show average per-student funding in Alberta was $11,464, more than 16 per cent below the national average of $13,692. Alberta’s been at the bottom of the national scale since 2019.)

While Schilling wouldn’t tell reporters when he thought a strike might happen if a deal can’t be reached — that’s up to the union’s provincial executive council, he said — it’s worth noting that under Alberta labour law the teachers’ association now has 120 days during which its members can hit the bricks after giving 72 hours’ notice.

And Sept. 2, when students are scheduled to return to school, is only 83 days away. So draw your own conclusions about when the union might be most likely to strike if an impasse is reached in negotiations.

Finance Minister Nate Horner might have been wiser, therefore, to keep his lips zipped and let the Alberta Teachers’ Association and the Teachers Employer Bargaining Association have an opportunity to reach a deal without putting his oar in.

Arguably both sides have reasons to be anxious to reach an agreement. The union and bargaining association are scheduled to meet at the end of next week and again in August if necessary.

Before the end of the day, though, Horner had made a statement to media that started with the traditional claim about how much the United Conservative Party government respects “teachers, principals, system leaders and school divisions.”

Then he moved on to complaining about the way rank-and-file teachers rejected a mediator’s recommendation in early May that included a 12-per-cent pay increase over four years and “a government commitment of more than $400 million in classroom improvements which would have started this fall.”

ATA’s provincial executive council had voted to recommend that the union’s members accept that mediator’s report, but that recommendation was rejected by more than 62 per cent of the teachers who voted, suggesting a mood of impatience and militance similar to that seen in some other Canadian unions in the past few months.

At least Horner’s statement about the ATA strike vote was not as disdainful as his response to a similar 90-per-cent strike vote by direct employees of the provincial government represented by the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees in late May.

But his statement — which unlike the one he published about AUPE was not posted on the government’s website — may serve to remind voters that public-sector contract negotiations in Alberta under the UCP really take place directly between the government, which gets to pull employer negotiating teams’ strings with secret bargaining mandates, and unions. And thus the government itself owns any bad outcomes like inconvenient strikes that may result.

A strike by civil servants or a strike by teachers all across the province would leave egg all over Premier Danielle Smith’s and her cabinet members’ faces, despite the ways some of the Maple MAGA extremists in the UCP might imagine they could turn such a situation to their advantage.

A province-wide strike by public and Catholic teachers just as schools were about to reopen would be a particular embarrassment and a strong indicator that the UCP’s management skills are not all they are cracked up to be.