Western Standard - Alberta teachers get nothing from union during strike

00:00:00.000 Hello, my name is Leah Musha, a reporter here at the Western Standard, and today I have with me

00:00:09.480 John Hilton O'Brien, the Executive Director of Parents for Choice, an Alberta-based advocacy

00:00:15.600 organization dedicated to informing parents on Alberta's education system. So today, obviously,

00:00:23.280 the big issue is the teacher strike, which just began yesterday, October 6th. So yeah, that's

00:00:31.200 mostly what we're going to be talking about. He's obviously an expert on the subject, so we're just

00:00:35.820 going to get straight into the topic. So thank you very much for joining us, John, today. Thank you,

00:00:41.980 Leah. Yeah, very nice for you to be here. So the first question I have for you is very general.

00:00:47.200 Is this strike about pay, or is this about something else? The strike is about a lot of

00:00:54.200 things, but you know, it's all about the numbers, really. The Alberta government's budget is just

00:01:01.700 short of $80 billion. It's running a deficit of $6.5 billion, and that's a bit of a problem. Now,

00:01:10.220 education is roughly a $10 billion spend. That's our annual budget for it, 9.6, I think, plus capital

00:01:19.820 spending of $2.6 billion. Now, what's going on with the teachers? Well, the latest offer from the

00:01:26.680 government is 12% of new salary over four years. They're talking about hiring 3,000 new teachers,

00:01:35.820 which I presume is over and above the amount that our population will increase, and 1,500 new EAs.

00:01:43.740 Our population has risen by 17% over the last six years, so it's short spending, relatively speaking,

00:01:52.940 to our population growth. But there's not much we can do about that. What we can do is build a lot of

00:02:01.180 new classrooms, and to that end, the government has proposed massive new spending, $8.6 billion of new

00:02:09.260 capital spending so that we can get the schools in place for our public schools to have enough space

00:02:15.660 to hire still more teachers to keep our classroom sizes reasonable. Now, that's going to cost us

00:02:23.420 $2.6 billion. That's the offer to the teachers, is $2.6 billion, plus the $8.6 billion.

00:02:34.380 Well, that's going to add $11.2 billion to our deficit of $6.5 billion. So you can understand that

00:02:41.100 the government is offering what they're offering, and they're fairly unlikely to budge farther than that.

00:02:47.980 And there's reason. The numbers tell the whole story here.

00:02:52.060 Okay. Well, on that note, I guess, yesterday, Jason Schilling spoke at a press conference,

00:03:01.100 and he was talking about how, basically, I think summarized that teachers don't feel like they're

00:03:06.460 being supported, even with the deal that they rejected. So I guess you were talking mostly about

00:03:12.620 the financial stuff, but what are they thinking when they're saying they're not supported?

00:03:16.540 Well, teachers are very worried about difficulties in classrooms, right? I had one teacher talking

00:03:24.540 about the fact that he has an autistic kid in his class, moderate to severe. And what he said was,

00:03:32.860 this student spends his entire time playing in the sink and screaming. That is all he does.

00:03:40.300 And, you know, I've spent some time working with people with developmental disabilities. It's really

00:03:46.540 what qualified me to work with politicians. And I'd have to say professionally, I think that that

00:03:52.620 gentleman is talking about a student who's beyond his classroom's ability to care. And perhaps we should

00:03:59.180 exercise a little more caution about our mainstreaming policies and make sure that we have the support needed for

00:04:05.740 children like that. They perhaps shouldn't be in a mainstream classroom. So there's two sides of this

00:04:12.860 sort. Yes, we do need more EAs, but also we need to take more care with what students are in what classrooms.

00:04:21.820 Discipline is also a problem. A child who strikes a teacher is right back in the classroom, the same

00:04:28.060 classroom three days later. And so teachers aren't being supported in that way. Now, part of the problem

00:04:35.820 with EAs is also that the Jordan Principal funding from the federal government ended. And that cut several

00:04:43.820 hundred EA positions out of the province. And many school boards had been accustomed to the funding.

00:04:51.740 Jordan's principle is funding that attaches to First Nations children who are in classrooms. And many

00:05:00.220 school boards were using it to hire educational assistance for the classroom. And they may have

00:05:06.460 been relying on it a little more than they should have. So the cancellation of that program for public

00:05:12.780 schools caught them off guard. But seriously, we had as many EAs under Jordan's principle as we were

00:05:21.340 hiring new EAs every year. So it's something like three or 4% of the total number of EAs were cut by the

00:05:29.660 federal government in a heartbeat this spring. So that's created a lot of extra trouble. These aren't

00:05:36.700 things that the provincial government didn't deal with very much. All they can do is increase the funding

00:05:43.340 we have for EAs. They've added 1,500. Well, that almost keeps pace with growth. But we're growing so

00:05:51.820 fast because of our immigration policies nationally that it's a problem. But there's another place where

00:05:58.940 teachers might not feel supported. And they're feeling it today very much. You see, the Alberta Teachers

00:06:08.540 Association does not have a strike fund. The strike pay they're getting, and again, I'm coming back to

00:06:15.340 the numbers, strike pay is zero. And this is shocking. Why is it happening that way? Well, the special

00:06:24.540 emergency fund that the ATA would normally be taking strike funds out of is only 19 million dollars. Now,

00:06:33.340 again, by the numbers, if this was the Canadian Auto Workers Union, their strike fund for this size of

00:06:40.140 budget would be 160 million dollars. So we're looking at a strike fund that's roughly 10 percent of the

00:06:47.180 size that a well-functioning union would maintain. Well, why is it so low? Well, part of the reason

00:06:56.620 is that in 2022, the Alberta Teachers Association safened 16 million dollars out of that fund to create

00:07:06.460 what they called the Defense Advocacy Fund, which is basically a political slush fund. They plan to use

00:07:12.940 it for intervention and politics. They plan to use it for lawsuits, whatever they can do. And that's why 0.63

00:07:22.940 there's only 19 million dollars in what should be the strike fund. And the ATA has advised teachers

00:07:30.860 that they're not going to use their strike fund, their special emergency fund for strike pay. Instead,

00:07:37.020 they're spending it on advertising. I'm seeing lawn signs. And of course, ATA's favored candidates can put

00:07:45.900 those lawn signs right beside their own lawn signs. So I think we can see how that works.

00:07:52.620 Wow. Wait, so advertising, ATA advertising for lawn signs and stuff. So are you talking about the

00:07:57.660 candidates that they're endorsing? Or are you talking about lawn signs for the ATA, like the strike?

00:08:02.460 It's for the strikes. Things like Stand With Education and so on, StopTheExcuses.ca. They have

00:08:08.940 websites. They have a website for candidates. And it's not entirely clear whether they're endorsing

00:08:17.420 candidates, but they do have a website for candidates that candidates can put their information on,

00:08:23.980 which is tantamount to an endorsement. And they also produced a very, very professional campaign

00:08:35.260 strategy book. It's weighty. It would do the UCP or NDP parties very proud. And it carefully explains

00:08:45.820 to ATA locals how they should get involved in politics. And there's some, there's some arguments

00:08:53.180 about the legality of that. But the truth is that in 2021, the ATA spent $1.1 million as a third party

00:09:02.700 advertiser. Not directly, admittedly. Also in Calgary, Calgary's future was funded by the Canadian

00:09:12.220 union of provincial, or sorry, of public employees. And those guys spent close to $2 million. They

00:09:19.420 endorsed every seat on council and the entire public school board and six out of seven of their

00:09:25.820 candidates won. So the unions won and control the Calgary public school board. There's no denying that

00:09:34.540 really. Edmonton Labour Council did a similar thing with Edmonton, but we don't see the money there so

00:09:41.580 much. They got five out of the eight candidates they put up, which was enough to control Edmonton public.

00:09:48.940 Between those two boards, that's two and a half mil, sorry, two and a half billion dollars in funding

00:09:54.540 they control. So the prize is really worth the pursuit for them. Now this year, the government

00:10:01.420 has attempted to tamp down spending on third party advertising. They say you can only spend, put $5,000

00:10:10.220 into it by any organization or person. And the total spend for the province is only around 50 cents per

00:10:18.460 person. So they can only spend about two and a half million dollars this year, maybe 3 million if you

00:10:25.180 count pre-writ spending. But there's a little caveat about the donation. You see, as long as they made the

00:10:32.620 donation before the first Monday of May, then they could have put any amount they wanted into a third

00:10:41.340 party advertising fund. Okay. And we know that the ATA has that money put aside and we know that the strike fund

00:10:50.220 isn't being used for strike pay. Oh. So it does seem possible that the ATA may have put some money into a third

00:10:59.420 party advertiser. We won't know until this election is over, possibly not for months. So that would explain the sheer

00:11:08.700 intensity of their advertising right now. Wow. Okay. As well as the professional materials they prepared.

00:11:15.820 Hmm. Like, so you're talking about like what they're spending the, what they should be spending on like

00:11:21.740 first strike to compensate the teachers instead, but they're not. So why I'm kind of confused a bit as to

00:11:29.340 like, why did the teachers, like 90% of the members vote, rejected the vote for like to agree to the deal with

00:11:37.980 the government. If they knew they weren't going to get paid, like they weren't supported by the union.

00:11:43.900 I don't believe most teachers realized that there wasn't any strike pay. I'm pretty sure people were

00:11:49.420 flat-footed. Most of the teachers that I've spoken to were absolutely shocked when I told them there was

00:11:56.380 no strike pay. This was not common knowledge. And they didn't inform the teachers at all before,

00:12:01.260 like they were rejected. Oh, there was a memo, but you had to go onto the ATA website and it was a

00:12:07.180 little bit buried. Hmm. And of course, when you belong to an association and they send you a lot of

00:12:14.860 emails, especially over the summer, a lot of that's going into your spam folder or it's coming while you're

00:12:22.300 on vacation and you're not going to get around to that. It's just buried in your inbox. So I can

00:12:28.140 understand why teachers would not realize that. And along with that, the ATA's communications to

00:12:35.500 teachers for two years have all been about, we're going to strike. So everyone expected a strike. Okay.

00:12:42.940 Yeah. And then, you know, almost one in three teachers is not actually a classroom teacher. They're,

00:12:51.820 they're in administration. Hmm. Right. And that's going to be a problem for them. Yeah. There's 55,000

00:13:00.060 ATA members, 41,000 of them are active, 8,000 or so are substitute teachers, although they also vote on the

00:13:07.580 strike vote thing. So they're not directly connected, but there's only 29,000 or so classrooms in Alberta

00:13:15.580 by the numbers. So that means there's 12 or 13,000 people who are active members of the ATA who are

00:13:24.620 actually administrators. And those folks tend to have more education than the rest of teachers.

00:13:32.460 And they may have a little more time and they get to go to school to school

00:13:36.620 and they would be the primary advocates for a strike because they're more concerned with ideology

00:13:43.260 naturally because they have the academic background. So there's a lot ideologically pushing

00:13:50.540 ordinary teachers to vote yes to strike. Even if they're not sure it's a great idea,

00:13:56.700 there's so much pressure on them. Wow. Okay. Well, on that note as well,

00:14:02.700 I just have another question about the compensation they were going to get by the government,

00:14:11.260 um, which they rejected, which was the 12% over four years. So what, like, especially like you said,

00:14:19.820 the amount of money the government would be spending on the deal if they had agreed to it,

00:14:24.620 it's already like, what do you say, 11 billion or something? Oh, it would be 2.6 billion.

00:14:29.740 That's the, if any fact the government's offered to the ATA. Okay. Now I've come out and print in

00:14:36.220 the Western standard supporting increasing pay for teachers. And let me explain where I got to that

00:14:43.260 position from there are 735,000 students in union schools. Okay. Um, there's about 87,000 K that are out

00:14:57.180 in charter public and private schools, a number that's increasing, which should concern us, especially

00:15:03.580 since when we look at the wait lists, it looks like a quarter of the population has either left the public

00:15:09.900 system or are trying to leave. There's a massive loss of public confidence in the public schools

00:15:16.700 and people are, as they say, voting with their feet. But what we're really seeing here out of those

00:15:24.060 numbers is if there's 29,000 classrooms, that means we're approaching $350,000 per classroom as a total

00:15:33.260 cost. And that's not including in the capital spending. That's a lot of money per classroom.

00:15:41.740 But what shocks me is the average teachers only paid 85,000 of that. If you told me that you were

00:15:48.380 running a service organization or service company where you only paid your main frontline staff a quarter

00:15:56.060 of your budget, I would be knocking on your door in the morning demanding that you allow me to invest

00:16:01.980 because you're clearly making a lot of money. So the government has to ask, well, where's the money

00:16:07.740 going? And my point to the government is, well, salaries for classroom teachers are the smallest

00:16:15.260 part of the problem. You can afford to bump them. And apparently the government has hurt me at least a

00:16:21.500 little because in the salary grid offer, they gave a disproportionate bump to the teachers at the bottom

00:16:29.260 of the scale. And the ones with less education who are more likely to be the classroom teachers and

00:16:36.780 less likely to be administration. So they've at least heard me there. But I would support, indeed,

00:16:44.300 giving a little more money to teachers. That's the smallest problem. But ultimately, you know,

00:16:50.220 when we're looking at this pattern, looking at these numbers, the ATA is not acting like a union that's

00:17:02.700 negotiating in good faith for their members. When we're looking at spends in the millions of dollars,

00:17:09.660 and the ATA and their allied unions who sit on boards like Public Interest Alberta or the Parkland

00:17:16.540 Institute, between them, they spent $4.4 million as third party advertisers in 2021. That is more than

00:17:25.100 UCP spent in their running provincial election campaign. The ATA is not acting like they're

00:17:32.140 negotiating in good faith as a union. They're acting like a rival political party. And I am absolutely

00:17:41.100 floored by how generous the government is being in that context. I would think they would recognize

00:17:50.380 that the adversarial approach taken by the ATA is in fact adversarial. But the government appears to

00:17:59.420 understand that this is not about teachers. The people who have the adversarial relationship

00:18:05.660 are the people at the top of the union, the officers that teachers elected. But you know,

00:18:12.860 it's costing your average teacher $400 or $500 a day for this strike. And if I was a teacher,

00:18:20.940 I would be giving serious thought to impeaching the leadership of the ATA that dragged me into this.

00:18:27.980 Well, for impeaching, like how would that process go? Do they need to get us a number of signatures or

00:18:34.540 something? I'm not sure how they would do it. But I do know that I hear rumors from teachers who are very

00:18:41.980 angry with the ATA administration. And I think after their next paycheck, they're going to be angry indeed.

00:18:49.180 Yeah. Also on that, because the government announced that they're going to do a lockout on,

00:18:55.660 I think it was October 9th. And that's obviously a negotiation tactic because they want to get the

00:19:03.500 negotiation going probably. The reason for that is that what a real union would,

00:19:10.300 a real union administration would do when they're low on a strike fund is they would call for

00:19:16.780 rolling walkouts. So you only strike at these four schools on Monday, you strike at those four schools

00:19:25.100 on Tuesday and so on. So you only have to pay strike pay on those days and your members aren't affected

00:19:32.140 so badly. And the government has said, we're calling your bluff. There's none of that. If you're on strike,

00:19:39.740 you're on strike. No rolling walkouts. I think it's a waste of effort on the government's part because

00:19:47.340 the ATA has got, well, the top end of the ATA has absolute tunnel vision on this and they want a

00:19:55.260 general strike come hell or high water. Hmm. Okay. So no matter, like, I just want to know more about

00:20:03.020 the rules on how that strike works. So say like, I don't know, the majority of teachers out of school,

00:20:09.020 they want to go back to work. They, they hate the fact that they're not getting paid. Like you said,

00:20:12.860 there's 400 or $500 a day or something off their paycheck. And well, I mean, they're not getting

00:20:17.580 paid, but yeah, like you said, they all want to go back, but they can't because they're a part of

00:20:22.300 the union. So could they, they can't like just quit the union, right? Like that's not how it works.

00:20:27.580 We set the ATA up in legislation, in fact, under the Teaching Professions Act. Honestly,

00:20:35.580 they should be subject to FOIP requests. If you ask me, anybody that's set up in legislation should be.

00:20:43.020 But they're not. So a bigger problem is that even if the majority of the teachers,

00:20:50.140 the classroom teachers wanted to go back, the administrators of the school,

00:20:55.740 the management is part of the union and they want to stay on strike. Okay. Yeah. Makes sense. Okay.

00:21:06.700 Yeah. So you're talking about the advertisers, how much they spend on third party advertisers.

00:21:11.180 And you also send me information about operate operational costs in general, they're spending

00:21:16.220 like, or usually like 30 million for the past few years or so on average. So no, why do they need to

00:21:24.860 spend that? Like, besides third party advertisers, what are they doing with all that money? That's so

00:21:30.460 necessary. That is an open question that I don't think I can speculate on. Although I know that they,

00:21:38.380 they do pay handsome salaries to their executives. Hmm. Oh, I have a good question. I don't know if

00:21:44.540 this is online because unfortunately I didn't research this prior, but do you know how much

00:21:48.940 Jason Schilling gets paid by chance? Not entirely. No. He's subject to a range same as anybody else.

00:21:57.900 They, they take the salary scale idea seriously. He's paid well over a hundred thousand dollars though.

00:22:03.980 Hmm. Okay. Well, let's see. I think that's all I had to ask you, unless you want to add anything else

00:22:12.060 that you think would be good and informative. I think we've said enough. Yeah. I think so too.

00:22:17.340 I think we covered a lot. So that's good. It's a lot of numbers, but this strike is really all about

00:22:23.740 the numbers and the numbers don't look good. They don't. From what you told me, they don't. So,

00:22:29.500 well, thank you very much, Don. I appreciate it. Thank you, Leah. Yeah. Well, if you guys enjoyed

00:22:35.420 this video, you can subscribe to the Western channel, Western Standard YouTube channel,

00:22:40.700 as well as subscribe to our actual news website, which is $10 a month or $100 a year.

00:22:47.580 And yeah, that's about it. So thank you for joining us and goodbye.

Western Standard - October 07, 2025

Alberta teachers get nothing from union during strike

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript