HANNAFORDļ¼ Could the Alberta Teachersā Association pull a TBA trickļ¼
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Summary
In this episode, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper's former chief of staff and current political science professor, Ian Brody, joins me to talk about the Alberta teachers strike, and his theory of how things will go downhill from here.
Transcript
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Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show
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of the Western Standard. It is Thursday, October the 9th. On Monday, Alberta teachers walked off
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the job, having rejected what I consider a handsome strike settlement offer that was actually
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recommended to them by their union. This, despite the fact that the union has no money to fund a
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strike pay. What that suggests to me is that the 89% of Alberta teachers who rejected the offer
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loathe the UCP so much that rather than have 12% over four years, they'd rather have no salary at
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all for a while. That's how much they hate this government. But I could be wrong. With me today
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is an old friend and colleague, Professor Ian Brody. For two years he was Chief of Staff to Prime
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Minister Stephen Harper. These days he's teaching political science at the University of Calgary,
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and he knows a lot more than I do, and he's got a theory of how things go downhill from here.
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Look, great of you to come on this morning and talk about this. Ian, do 89% of Alberta teachers
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Well, I think there's always going to be conflict between the provincial government and the teachers
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because the teachers always want more and the province has to find the money to pay for it.
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I think there's some bigger issues here as well. We've all obviously coped with the impact of
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inflation over the course of the past four years, and I think the teachers are trying to catch up a
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little bit on that. Look, I am part of the professor shooting here at the University of Calgary. We had
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the same negotiations with the university earlier this year. We settled for less than the teachers
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rejected in their contract vote the week before last. But looking forward further ahead here, I think
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the bigger problem is the union is worried about, in a sense, the success of the province. Alberta's
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been such a success economically and socially. People want to move here, in particular working-age
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people who've done kids want to move here, and that's got growth of the student population for all
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the primary and secondary schools in the province. So it's not just a matter of today's issues in the
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education system that the union's worried about. They're worried about the next three or four years.
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The province is building new schools at a feverish pace to try to keep pace. That's part of managing the
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success of the province. And the teachers are worried that teacher numbers will keep up with
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the enrollment pressures on the public schools. They don't want those class sizes. Well, obviously,
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they'd like the class sizes to be smaller. That means more jobs for teachers and more
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dues for the teachers' union. But what they're really worried about is, over the course of the
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next couple of years, you get another 100,000 or more than 100,000 students in the school system.
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Is the province going to keep pace with hiring teachers in order to keep pace with the
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growth of enrollment? Well, do you think they are? I mean, the Ministry of Education is not
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unaware that with more students comes the need for more teachers. Yeah, so the question is, will they
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all be in the public school system, underneath the school boards? Or is the independent school system,
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homeschooling, all the other types of schooling that we saw grow over the last 10 years, but in
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particular during the COVID pandemic, is that going to eat away at the influence of the teachers' union
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you know, over time? In a sense, there's a classic battle here for market share. Alberta has been at
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the leading edge in Canada of innovating with different types of charter schools, independent
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schools, private schools. As you know, Nigel, there's vibrant religious communities in Alberta who all want
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to set up their own schools, Mennonite schools, Jewish schools, Muslim schools, Christian schools
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of different sorts, in addition to all the other private schools and charter schools. There's a
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competition for those students. We can't just assume, and I don't think the union can assume, that they're
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all just going to go into the public school system. And in a sense, the Smith government might decide to
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encourage faster growth of those independent school systems at the expense of the growth of the public
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school system. I think that's part of the issue behind this strike. Well, of course, from my perspective,
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I would hope that they would. But let's just say that, let's leave me out of that debate for a moment.
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There is a good reason to actually promote private education, or at least education outside the public
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system. If you believe the Fraser Institute, which I do and I suspect you may have some sympathy for,
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the results from the non-public sector are very good, and they cost about 70 percent of what the
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public sector does. There are all sorts of reasons for that, but basically it's a cheap way to get a good
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education. Now then, is that what's behind the union's problem, that they actually can't compete?
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Well, look, I think you put your finger on exactly what the bigger context here is. The Daniel Smith
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government and Jason Kenney government, before the Smith government, understood it's not just a cost and
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benefit analysis here, Nigel. Everything about Alberta education improves when parents and families
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have more options for the education of their children. Nobody wants to live in a jurisdiction
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or in a province where you only have one choice. You have to send your kid to the local
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elementary school. It may or may not suit your children's needs, your family's needs.
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Everybody wants the choice, and this is the problem that the teachers union and the school boards are
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running into is that as more and more people come here with a greater and greater diversity
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of the province, people with all sorts of backgrounds, they get here and find out that
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there's more than one choice for their kids. We've got public and separate school. We've got
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inside the public school system many different streams. We've got the charter school system,
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independent schools. You can educate your kid at home in these sort of different forms of
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homeschooling. I think that's one of the advantages of the Alberta education system,
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but all of those are eating away at the market share for school boards and for the ATA's main
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teachers union segments. If the province leans into that, which I think the province should,
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not just that there might be a cost advantage to the profits, but the more choice parents have,
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the happier they are with the provincial school system. That's going to be a challenge for the
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teachers union or for the public schools going forward. I see that. We had a story in the
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Western Standard yesterday talking about a referendum question that has been pitched by somebody. I mean,
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who knows whether it'll make it through the sausage machine and actually be a ballot question when the
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time comes, but actually suggesting that the province should not fund private education or education outside
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the public system. So I think that what you're talking about is a very real thing. They're very anxious
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about their jobs, the future, the union use. Now, some people might say, I don't think I'm one of them,
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and I don't think you are. But look, there is an argument that if you want a united society, you don't want
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too many alternatives in education. You push everybody through the same system of instruction,
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and they all come out thinking more or less the same thing. What we're looking at now is we're going to
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have, you know, we're going to have Christians, we're going to have Muslims, we're going to have people
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who don't believe anything, and we're going to have the people who come out of the public system with
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possibly not such a good education, and we have a fragmented society. And we can't have a fragmented
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society. Can we? Or maybe we can? What do you think? Well, look, democratic societies are always
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messy and complicated that way. We have more than one political party in this province. As you know,
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Nigel, anybody can form a political party that they want. Anybody can go to whatever church they want,
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or no church at all, different types of religious organizations. Yeah, this is part of the messiness of
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big modern democratic countries. I think it's one of the strengths of our system, but there are people
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who see that that's a weakness, and certainly you want to make sure the educational standards of these
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schools are keeping up. But the way to guarantee that, it seems to me, is to let the parents choose,
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or families choose where their kids go. I mean, the way to lose control of standards altogether, the way to
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lose control of the quality of the education and the inclusiveness of the education is for every
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neighbor to have only one choice, and everybody has to send their kid to the same school. Then the
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school has no particular incentive to worry about the type of education they're offering because they
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have a monopoly in the local area. But monopoly providers never have to worry about the quality of
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the service that they're providing. That works for schools as well as it provides anything else. If we
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only had one grocery store for the city of Calgary, it could be very indifferent as to the type of
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vegetables or the type of produce or the type of groceries that it provides to its consumers,
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because there's only one choice. Basically the same thing for education. Whereas I think there's
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going to be this, as you said, it's a referendum effort to try to eliminate funding or some of the
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supports for independent schools. In fact, we're now very far down this road here in Alberta. There's
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whole neighborhoods in Calgary and Edmonton and towns outside of the two big cities, whole neighborhoods
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being set up where we have an underbuilt public school system because there are so many other
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alternatives. The bigger the independent school system becomes, the more people opt for charter schools
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or for homeschooling and all the other choices that we have here, the harder it would be to flick a
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switch and just say all those kids now have to move to the public system. I guess what would happen
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if some of the financial supports for independent schools disappeared overnight? In my part of Calgary,
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I live on the west side of Calgary. There's so many choices for education that the Calgary public
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school board and the separate school board just don't have the capacity if all of those kids moved
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from the independent schools and the charter schools overnight into the public school system.
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The longer this sort of plethora of choice goes on, the harder it is to imagine that you could say
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next September, all those supports are disappearing and thousands of more kids are going to move into
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the public school system that compounds the problem. Obviously the ATA is aware of this, the school
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boards are aware of this and the province is aware of this, that the success of education choice in
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Alberta almost guarantees that it's going to continue on into the future. The public school boards just don't
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have the capacity to manage all those kids if they suddenly switch back into the public system.
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Well, how many are there? I mean, what percentage of students in Alberta are outside the public system?
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Well, I think that's a difficult thing to measure because the choices are so complicated and there's so
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many choices that we don't really have, I don't think, especially good ideas of in the regulated
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homeschooling market. I think we have a pretty good idea of that. But beyond that, not everybody in the
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homeschooling or independent school system runs the Alberta curriculum. And so I think we're talking about
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on the west side of Calgary, probably a quarter or a third of the students aren't in the public school
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system. There'd be thousands of kids if we suddenly had to snap them all back. And there's
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neighborhoods where the schools are underbuilt as it is. So it's part of the challenge of the growth
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of the province is that if you moved all those kids out of the very vibrant other choices that we have
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here in Alberta, that only compounds the province's challenge of managing the growth of the public school
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system. Right. Ian, I want to take you in two directions. One has to do with the curriculum
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selection and the other is the political side of how things go from here. But just on the matter of
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curriculum, I'm sure that one of the reasons why people say, I'm getting my kid out of this and I'm
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putting them in a separate school of some description, is that they're very anxious about the kind of
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intellectual education that the kids are getting. What I'm talking about, of course, is the dirty books
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in the school library and the overall woke tenor of public education. It probably isn't as bad as what
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people think it is, but it's still bad enough. And, you know, the books are real and the kids do come
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home from school and say to their dad who works in the oil patch, you know, that we're living on dirty
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money and things like that. So the school system has definitely got a point of view and it definitely
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teaches that. And a lot of people don't like that. Now, as a factor in the decision to walk out,
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go on strike, how important do you think that is? Are they fighting for the right to teach kids what
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Yeah, I mean, look, everybody in every walk of life wants to get paid for what they want to do and
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not have to report to the boss. It's part of why I work here at the university, because I have some
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freedom to teach what I wanted to do, my own research, obviously.
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That's what Harper used to say about you. Anyway, carry on.
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Yeah, of course, yes. I thought it made me a better chief of staff, but he might have had a different view.
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So, you know, fair enough. But look, we have the Calgary Classics Academy here in Calgary,
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a big long waiting list for a classics liberal arts education. You could call it more conservative.
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I'm not sure that's the right political description, but more traditional topics being taught in those
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classrooms, STEM Academy, Math Academy, different language academies. And then, of course,
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the religious schools that are cropping up all over the place to teach a more faith oriented or
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faith aligned form of the Alberta curriculum or other curriculums. You know, there's longstanding
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Catholic and other Christian traditions of education that sometimes you find aren't reflected in the public
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school classrooms. So if you send your kids, if you want to have that kind of education for your
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kids, you have that choice in most parts of Alberta. That's great. And that's going to continue to be the
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case. I think the political side of this, I don't think that every public school teacher is motivated
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by this sort of thing. I think some of the woke education accusations are overdone in some of the
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public schools that I've encountered here in Calgary. But I think that's part and parcel of,
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you know, you lose 5,000 students across Alberta to Classics Academy or to STEM Academy. That's a threat
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to the public school system. That's a challenge for the Teachers Association as well. And I think that's
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part of the background to the strike for sure. Well, you know, one thing, if you sign your kid
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up for Cailin Ford's Enterprise, you probably will not be worrying about what's in the school library.
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Probably not. No, I think the library there is probably pretty dependable. Yeah.
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So, you know, what's the matter with the people in the system who think that they need to take a stand
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on that issue and condemn the provincial government when it says, well, actually, maybe we, maybe we
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shouldn't have these books. I mean, there's something, the competition is eating your lunch
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and you're sticking to the, sticking to your silly standard. What's going on in their heads there, Ian?
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No, like everybody who works in the system, whether they're going to admit it on a television show or
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out in the public realm or not, can see what's going on here. And the more choices that parents have,
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uh, the more motivated the parent is to, uh, uh, to deliver the kind of education for their kids
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that they, that they want, the tougher it is for the public school board to compete. Look, but here
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in Calgary, the Calgary board of education is reacting. There's all sorts of internal streams
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inside the Calgary board system, uh, to offer different types of education to different communities
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inside the, uh, inside the city. And yeah, I don't regret that. That's the way the competition's
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supposed to work. The more competition there is from other types of education, uh, alters,
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other types of school systems, other types of, uh, uh, uh, private schools and homeschooling,
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the more the public school board has to set up that kind of internal system inside its own,
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you know, uh, uh, traditional learning systems and so forth. Uh, that's good for everybody. Uh,
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it's good if the public school systems react to that. Uh, I don't mind that, uh, but they can all see
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the writing on the wall here. So there's more and more choices for parents. There's more and more
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pressure on the public school system to innovate as well. Yeah. Well, it may be so. Look, um, you,
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you put something out in the public square a few days ago about where this goes from here. And I'd
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like to ask you about that. Um, basically the gist of what you were saying, and I'm going to let you
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explain it further, but the gist of what you were saying is look, the, the, the teachers are going to
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have to go back pretty soon because they don't have any money, but they'll, and then the legislature
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will resume and they'll be even legislated back to work. So this isn't going to last that long.
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What then I think you were arguing stops the teachers from buying memberships in the UCP so they
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can crash the convention and, and, uh, cause trouble in that area. Now you had some, what,
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what were you thinking about there? Yes. Like I've been worried about this for quite some time,
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Nigel. Uh, the internal governance of the UCP here is part of the, the strategy for all of these
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unions or will be eventually. Um, the legislature comes back, I think it's on the 23rd of October.
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Uh, I assume that at least somewhere in the provincial government, the province is planning
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if the strike is still going on for back to work legislation and that would, uh, involve the
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settlement of the strike by something other than, uh, the strike that's going on some kind of
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arbitration system. Um, if the legislation passes the first week that the legislature is back sometime
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on the 23rd, 24th, 25th of October, uh, the early bird registration deadline for the UCP convention is
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October 31st. Uh, so you can join up, uh, the UCP and get a, a ticket to go to their convention,
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which is later on in November for 160 by $170. It wouldn't take the, the, the UCP convention is
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in Edmonton where the UCP is a bit weaker on the ground and where the teachers union is therefore a
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bit stronger on the ground relative to the UCP. The UCP has left open the possibility that you don't
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need many teachers, you know, uh, 2000 teachers, 3000 teachers, uh, sign up as members of the UCP
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as a way of getting back at the province for back to work legislation and send their members to this
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convention. They can then take half the provincial board of directors of the UCP in this convention,
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the other half at the next convention a year from now, they could agitate for a leadership
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review for a Daniel Smith's leadership of the UCP. Um, we know that that's not that complicated.
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This is how Jason Kenney's leadership of the UCP came apart. Um, it doesn't matter where they're
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from in the province. They can be all from one riding. They can all be from a couple of ridings
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just in Edmonton and they could be a real force for trouble inside the UCP convention, uh, the third
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week of November, uh, up in Edmonton. And this, if they don't do it at this convention, they can do it
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at the next convention. It looks like, you know, the provincial treasurer and the provincial
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government's given every indication that the province's finances are turning a little bit tighter.
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So the year over year big spending growth to solve every growth problem in the province that we've
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had over the last four or five years is coming to an end. The province's spending is mostly on
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salaries, you know, teachers' salaries, professors' salaries, I have to say mine, doctors' salaries
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from the AHS system and so forth. The big growth in payrolls over the course of the last few years
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in the provincial government is eventually going to have to come to an end as the province's revenue
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starts to turn over with decline of oil prices and so forth, slowing up the Canadian economy,
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tariffs from the United States and so forth. All the public sector unions are going to be thinking
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about how can they exert maximum influence to stop that from hurting them and hurting their members.
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And the big open opportunity here is I think not very well thought through design of the UCP.
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Uh, those conventions coming up, uh, this year in November, and then a year from, uh,
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November are wide open opportunities for, you know, to be an especially well-organized or especially big union
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to send, uh, 5,000 people to that convention, seize control of the UCP board, and then have
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a direct pipeline over who the UCP nominates as candidates for the upcoming provincial election.
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Uh, I got to believe that every public sector union in the province is thinking about that,
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and I think it's incumbent on the UCP, uh, there's pressure at the upcoming convention to, uh, uh,
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turn over more of the influence over who runs for the UCP in the next election to
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the membership of the UCP as opposed to the leadership of the UCP.
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That's an opportunity for the teachers union, for all the other public sector unions to flood
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into the UCP and to pick the candidates for the next election. I think that the UCP has to take this
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possibility seriously. And there now needs to be a reform effort to change the internal governance of
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the UCP before that becomes a really serious problem, not just for the UCP, but for the
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governance of the province. Are people in the UCP thinking about this?
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There are people thinking about this, but I think the time for action, if the strike is still going,
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if the teacher strike is still going on on the 23rd, when the legislature comes back,
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if the provincial government is planning back to work legislation, I trust that the imperative for
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reform of the UCP's process, look, it may be that this, uh, UCP convention at the end of
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November will have to be postponed. If the UCP can't figure out a way to make sure that the
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teachers unions and other public sector unions don't take advantage of their wide open membership
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rules to, uh, effectively hijack, to turn the UCP into another provincial NDP.
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Right. Well, I have a feeling that lots of people will be standing on guard for that,
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but it's going to be an interesting time between now and Christmas.
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No end of business for journalists and political scientists, Nigel.
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You may be back on the show before, before too long and say, look what happened. Oh my goodness.
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Anyway, great to see you and thank you for your insights on this. It's been really great.
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On behalf of the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.