Juno News - October 24, 2025


Alberta’s province-wide teacher strike has now kept more than 700,000 students out of class

Mentioned
Danielle Smith
Carney WARNS of ‘sacrifices’ for Canadians ahead of new budget Our country is in deep trouble

Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

182.69

Word count

351

Sentence count

21


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I sit down with a group of teachers to talk about what they want from the Alberta government and why they think class sizes need to be capped. We talk about class sizes, class sizes in the classroom, and the challenges teachers are facing.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 What brought you guys out today and what exactly is it that teachers are asking for from the government?
00:00:04.860 It seems like the government keeps saying that teachers aren't telling them what we want and what we need,
00:00:10.200 but we've been very, very clear that we need to address the class sizes and complexity in the classroom.
00:00:16.060 I've moved to a bigger school this year and I have 38 20-1 English students in one of my classes.
00:00:22.020 Keeping that managed, marking load-wise, keeping the kids all engaged is getting to be almost, well it is impossible,
00:00:28.180 and it's exhausting and it's burning teachers out.
00:00:30.380 The teachers' main demand is class caps.
00:00:32.880 Our classes are completely overrun now with kids.
00:00:36.400 Some of the biggest issues are trying to get class sizes down to something manageable
00:00:41.020 and, you know, providing a scenario that is best for kids, right, in learning.
00:00:47.300 Smaller class sizes and classroom caps would be great.
00:00:51.900 Most of Alberta's rapid population growth has come from immigration.
00:00:56.040 Do you guys feel like that's why the class sizes are increasing?
00:00:59.300 Not necessarily.
00:01:00.440 I think that's part of the equation that we have to look at.
00:01:04.460 But we have people moving to Alberta all the time from all across Canada, from all over the place.
00:01:09.360 I wouldn't say that that is primarily the concern with our classroom sizes in my experience.
00:01:14.860 I also feel like it's important for us to have immigration and it's a part of our culture as Canadians and it's a part of our growing society.
00:01:22.420 Daniel Smith actually held a campaign to encourage tons of people to come to Alberta.
00:01:28.140 I forget what the name was.
00:01:30.140 So I think the immigration idea is a complete scapegoat.
00:01:33.420 It's a complete distraction.
00:01:34.760 There is an issue with how much the population has grown.
00:01:39.500 However, I mean, we had lots of indications of this early on,
00:01:43.500 and there was delays in getting things funded and growing.
00:01:46.920 And you know what?
00:01:48.560 People are here.
00:01:49.640 We need to educate them, right?
00:01:51.440 So we need to work on solutions now, not in five years.