Max Genest - November 01, 2025


ALBERTA'S NDP ORCHESTRATED TEACHER STRIKE

Hosted by
Max Genest
Mentioned
Danielle Smith Mike Harris Nahid Nenshi
ISLAMIST REFUGEE MELTS DOWN OVER HALLOWEEN Toronto's Demographic Shift is Catastrophic

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

158.03

Word count

759

Sentence count

61

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

When Alberta's teachers went on strike, Premier Danielle Smith used the notwithstanding clause to force them to go back to work. She stood up to a corrupt, partisan machine that forgot who it works for. And good! That s exactly what a leader should do.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So Alberta's teachers went on strike, and Danielle Smith did something a little controversial. 1.00
00:00:05.980 She used the notwithstanding clause to force them to go back to work. 1.00
00:00:10.380 And good! That is exactly what a leader should do.
00:00:13.960 My only criticism is that she didn't do it sooner,
00:00:17.140 because this wasn't about education, it wasn't about kids or classrooms.
00:00:21.960 It was about politics.
00:00:24.080 The Alberta Teachers Union has never acted like a union.
00:00:27.340 It's always been a political arm of the NDP. Their leader, Nishin Nenshi, was collapsing in the polls.
00:00:34.480 So they needed a distraction, something that makes conservatives look cruel and themselves look compassionate.
00:00:41.540 So they manufactured a crisis, fed it to the media, and called it a strike.
00:00:47.320 Now, let's look at what they actually claimed because that is where the mask slips.
00:00:52.080 They claim teachers are underpaid and classrooms are overcrowded, but those problems come from Ottawa, not Edmonton.
00:01:00.320 Mass immigration policies are overloading schools.
00:01:03.080 Money printing is devaluing paychecks and driving up costs.
00:01:07.060 Those are federal failures, not provincial ones.
00:01:10.380 So why aren't they protesting on Parliament Hill?
00:01:13.500 Why are they protesting at the Alberta legislature instead?
00:01:18.380 Because this isn't about solving problems, it's about creating them.
00:01:22.240 It's political theater, using teachers and students as pawns to make the NDP look good and smear conservatives.
00:01:30.880 The union isn't fighting for education, it's fighting for power.
00:01:35.020 And here's the kicker, the UCP offered a solid deal.
00:01:38.580 Pay raises, more teachers, smaller classes.
00:01:41.500 And they still said no, they walked away from a great offer and from their own students.
00:01:47.220 that tells you everything you need to know and now we know just how far they were willing to go
00:01:52.620 the alberta teachers union wasn't just asking for a raise or better conditions their demands would
00:01:58.940 have meant an extra two billion dollars in spending on top of the 2.6 billion dollars the government
00:02:05.600 already set aside to end the strike that is 4.6 billion dollars total and let's be real the money
00:02:12.960 has to come from somewhere. It means more debt or higher taxes. There is no magic money tree
00:02:18.320 sitting in Edmonton and the union knows that. They knew the province can't just print cash or jack up
00:02:24.820 taxes without hurting families. They still brought those demands forward anyways because it wasn't
00:02:31.200 about getting a deal. It was about setting the UCP up to fail. And here's the truth. Nobody wants to
00:02:37.040 say, the public sector should not have unions. If your salary depends on the taxpayer, you are not
00:02:44.420 entitled to one. That's immoral. Unions are meant for the private sector, not for government workers
00:02:50.400 who are already funded by the public. Because when public sector unions strike, they're not
00:02:56.320 striking against a company. They're striking against the very people who pay them. That's
00:03:01.420 not collective bargaining, that's collective blackmail. And the NDP knows it. They know
00:03:07.400 every day of chaos, every closed classroom, every angry parent, it all helps them. They get the
00:03:14.620 headlines, they get the sympathy, they get to paint the UCP as villains, while families pay
00:03:20.840 the price. The NDP wins politically, and everyone else loses. And that's what makes this so
00:03:27.660 disgusting because this isn't just about politics. This is people's lives. Every single day kids sit
00:03:34.940 at home falling behind. A six-year-old who just learned how to read forgets half of it. A high
00:03:40.360 school student misses lessons they need to graduate. Parents are scrambling for child care, missing
00:03:46.100 work, burning through savings just to keep their homes together. And the people causing it all
00:03:51.400 are the ones calling you selfish for wanting schools open. That is who the NDP and the
00:03:57.540 teachers unions really are. The elites, the establishment who use regular families as
00:04:03.200 collateral for their politics. They talk about compassion, but they're stealing children's
00:04:08.500 education to boost their own popularity. They don't care who gets hurt as long as the cameras
00:04:14.440 keep rolling and the polls move. Danielle Smith was right to step in. She stood up to a corrupt 1.00
00:04:20.340 partisan machine that forgot who it works for. And she's not the first one to do it. Mike Harris,
00:04:26.160 Premier of Ontario, in the 90s and early 2000s, faced the same thing. Teachers went on strike,
00:04:32.660 he made it illegal to strike, and forced them to go back to work. He stood with the taxpayers,
00:04:37.620 not the unions. Smith did the same. And we need more leaders like her and Harris in this country,
00:04:44.040 people who remember who they serve and who they don't.