Western Standard - Is the Alberta Teachers' Association strike almost over？

00:00:00.000 Hello, everyone. My name is Leah Muschett. I am a reporter here at the Western Standard,

00:00:14.080 and today I have with me John Hilton O'Brien, the Executive Director of Parents for Choice,

00:00:19.200 an Alberta-based advocacy organization dedicated to informing the parents on Alberta's education

00:00:26.140 system. Okay, so we're just going to get straight into it. The strike is still in session. There's

00:00:31.660 also a lockout going on for teachers that was enforced by the government, public teachers.

00:00:38.200 So, John, I know recently, this week, you endorsed candidates for school board trustees

00:00:44.500 for the coming municipal election on Monday. So, yeah, why don't you tell us a little bit about

00:00:52.360 why you endorse trustees this time, since you guys have never done so before?

00:00:57.700 Well, some things have happened that took us a little by surprise over the last couple of elections.

00:01:03.280 You see, last time, one third-party advertiser called Calgary's Future spent $1.7 million as a

00:01:12.580 third-party advertiser. Other public interest unions, which, like Calgary's Future,

00:01:20.800 happened to have money from unions. Calgary's Future was CUPE. They spent $1.7 million. The other unions

00:01:28.240 spent $2.7 million, so it's $4.4 million altogether. It's a staggering amount of money for scale.

00:01:35.200 UCP spent $4.4 million on a winning provincial election. This is a lot of money, and we're seeing

00:01:43.360 endorsements from union-backed groups again. All we want to do is make sure that the playing field is

00:01:50.480 level. You see, in the end, parents deserve to be represented at the same level as the people who are

00:01:58.720 writing the big checks, and it's really that simple. Had it not been for this spending, we would not have

00:02:07.600 been worrying ourselves about this. But the candidates we endorsed, we endorsed off of a survey we do every

00:02:16.240 election of candidates, and these candidates were very consistent in their responses. They're absolutely

00:02:23.120 all for parental involvement, and they're also in favor of an end to secrecy policies and that sort

00:02:32.320 of thing. They like transparency. Okay, well, yeah, so in this case, I remember you saying at the press

00:02:39.120 conference earlier this week, which I covered, that you were doing Calgary specifically because of the

00:02:44.800 funding that was going on for the trustees there, and so you're focusing on Calgary, but in the future,

00:02:51.440 do you guys know for sure after these four years that you'll maybe potentially cover more

00:02:58.480 jurisdictions in Alberta? We will consider doing Edmonton Public in the future. Now, in 2021,

00:03:08.080 the Edmonton Labour Council also endorsed a slate of candidates for Edmonton Public School Board,

00:03:15.120 and five out of nine of those won. Here in Calgary, the union-backed slate got, I think, six or

00:03:24.320 eight of the, or sorry, yes, it was six out of the seven in Calgary, five out of nine in Edmonton.

00:03:30.640 We didn't worry about Edmonton as much because we didn't see evidence of the money being spent,

00:03:35.600 but in both cases, these are huge budgets we're talking about. Between Edmonton and Calgary in,

00:03:44.560 well, their budgets combined are north of 2.5 billion dollars with a B. That's a lot of money

00:03:53.520 in the hands of these trustees, and so it's important that we not have big money interfering.

00:03:58.560 Right, yeah, because I remember looking at like lots of the comments saying, you know, like,

00:04:03.920 we want to know more, but yeah, it feels like people just don't know that much, and I definitely

00:04:08.400 think it would be good to get more than just like one side of the, yeah, perspective.

00:04:13.280 Yeah, perspective. It's a bit worrying, and when, when turnout is low, big dollars for advertising,

00:04:21.680 they really make a difference. So, yeah, that's true. So, the lesson for parents is go ask who's

00:04:30.400 supported by the unions. If you see someone who's endorsed by a third-party advertiser working for a

00:04:36.880 union or someone who's endorsed literally by a union, don't vote for them, right? This is an incestuous

00:04:45.040 relationship. You can't have the union occupying both sides of a negotiating table. It doesn't work. 0.96

00:04:52.880 Right, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so let's move on to a little bit of strike talk.

00:04:59.120 Yeah, so realistically, because there is a press conference later today when we're filming this,

00:05:07.600 we're filming this on Friday the 17th, but how long do you really think this is going to keep going

00:05:14.320 on for the strike? Well, the union, as a union, has an absolute right to strike. Ideally, this would be

00:05:24.560 for better working conditions, although they seem to want to expand that to things that have nothing

00:05:30.320 to do with working conditions, but aside from the ATA's management being a little on the strange side

00:05:37.840 these days, absolutely, they do have a right to strike, and I'm sure the government of Alberta wants

00:05:44.480 to, wants to honour that as much as they can. At least, I sure hope they do. So really, the limiting

00:05:52.960 factor lies in the fact that the union is not giving out strike pay. Well, that's going to mean that

00:06:01.520 eventually teachers are going to say enough of this. Take the first deal that seems reasonable,

00:06:07.200 return to the negotiating table and end the strike. So with that in mind, I'm not sure that the provincial

00:06:15.920 government will invoke any sort of legislation to end a strike. There's no way to know that.

00:06:22.720 But this afternoon, we may learn differently. Yeah, that's true. It also just seems to me,

00:06:28.000 though, that like you said, I feel like they might just be waiting them out, like it seems like it.

00:06:33.840 They very well might. The province is using the money they're saving on teachers to give out

00:06:42.080 supports for parents who have children under 12. So they're trying to mitigate the effects of the

00:06:48.320 strike on the public. Good on them for doing so. That's probably going to matter for public perception

00:06:56.800 in the long term for them. But underlying that, there are real issues. And we should be grateful

00:07:05.920 to the ATA because they're bringing up some of these issues. Some of our classrooms really are too large.

00:07:14.480 That's not the only problem. Classroom complexity is a problem, as I've explained in the Western

00:07:20.960 Standard before. They aren't all problems that the province can easily be solved or that are necessarily

00:07:29.200 things that can be solved by this strike. But they're real problems that we have to face up to.

00:07:36.320 And even if they aren't really appropriate for labor action, these things need to be addressed.

00:07:43.360 I'm glad to see that in many cases, the province is addressing them, including some that aren't stated.

00:07:49.520 Right. Something we had under the old agreement was that some of the newer, younger teachers may not have

00:07:58.800 been paid enough to make them stable. When you're coming out of a four-year university degree, hip deep

00:08:05.600 in debt, it's kind of hard to have a stable life, especially if you wind up subbing or something.

00:08:13.440 But those initial contracts need to be stable. So I was glad to see that the government's offer

00:08:20.800 worked on that sort of problem. I was also very glad to see the government talk about spending a lot

00:08:26.720 of money on infrastructure. Infrastructure is just going to be a problem for us. It takes years to build a

00:08:36.480 new public school and we're growing too fast to build them fast enough. The quickest thing that

00:08:43.360 the government can probably do is slide a little money for independent schools and see if they can

00:08:50.800 get independent schools and charter schools built because those build faster and eventually see if the

00:08:58.880 public system can absorb the ones that are better run by the public system.

00:09:03.440 Right. But at first those schools can be in rentals, right? They could simply rent an office space,

00:09:10.880 that sort of thing. These are not easy solutions, but it's something that

00:09:19.040 the government may consider doing.

00:09:20.960 Okay. Yeah. Well, also, yeah. So I don't know if you were necessarily insinuating that, but I remember,

00:09:30.480 I think it was a few days ago, Danielle Smith had a press conference about like license plates, but

00:09:34.560 there's a question asked about obviously the strike stuff. And she was talking about how it might be an

00:09:39.600 administration issue. Like people are giving the money to like the bureaucrats in the, I think you

00:09:47.200 touched on this in a few of your articles as well. The bureaucrats instead of the actual teachers. So I

00:09:53.840 don't, in my perspective, I probably just don't know enough, but it seems like how is the government

00:09:59.920 supposed to be able, this seems more like maybe a trustee issue or yeah.

00:10:05.440 So underlying it is a bureaucratic problem. We're spending money that is coming close to $350,000 a

00:10:15.200 classroom for the public system. The average teacher's getting paid 85,000 of that, and that's less than a

00:10:21.600 quarter. So we've been suggesting to the government in the past, before the strike came up, that an

00:10:28.960 increase in pay for teachers doesn't seem unreasonable, at least for classroom teachers.

00:10:35.040 But the fact is that we're simply seeing the fact that not enough money is making it into the classroom.

00:10:43.280 Teachers are not feeling supported for good reason.

00:10:47.200 But the government's spending the money all right. Why is it not reaching the teachers?

00:10:53.840 And right there, the problem is going to come down to the trustees and the administration of the school

00:11:00.560 districts. We've seen arguments from places like the Public School Boards Association that we should

00:11:09.200 abolish, say, Catholic schools. The PSBAA went on a real tear about this a while ago, and their argument

00:11:18.320 was that it would be more economically efficient. Some provinces have bought that line and they simply

00:11:26.560 abolished their local school boards because that would clearly be more administratively efficient.

00:11:33.040 So there's three provinces that have done that. Ontario has abolished some of their larger public

00:11:39.440 school boards. And again, there's a concern there that's well-founded about how those boards are

00:11:46.240 spending the money.

00:11:47.040 Yeah, well, also talking more about, I don't know, abolishing certain school systems, like the

00:11:54.720 independent school system is being funded 70% by the government right now. And obviously, there's been a

00:12:03.280 citizen initiative petition that has been brought by Alicia Taylor, who turns out to be working for the ATA,

00:12:12.080 which I didn't know until recently. Well, I'm not sure if she has a paycheck from the ATA, but she's on

00:12:18.640 their executive council, which means that like every member of that council, before she can make a public

00:12:25.280 statement, she has to answer to Dennis Theobalt, who's their executive secretary. He's been there for seven

00:12:32.640 years. He's very, very powerful. And you don't make a move on that board without getting Theobalt's okay.

00:12:40.800 Hmm. That's, that's the way it works on a board.

00:12:44.320 So she would have had to get his permission to?

00:12:47.360 Before doing something so publicly exposed. Yes.

00:12:49.920 Oh my God. Okay.

00:12:50.800 So that is just the norm for any board that has a public facing component like this.

00:12:59.120 So she has to have gotten the ATAs okay for this.

00:13:02.240 Now we can say that the ATA would benefit because there's 48,000 students in independent schools,

00:13:12.560 and that's about 2000 teachers given the classroom sizes. And so the ATA would gain somewhere between

00:13:20.320 two and a half and three million dollars in additional union dues per year. So the ATA does

00:13:25.600 have a financial incentive to push this narrative. The problem is that the narrative they're pushing

00:13:32.880 is so wrongheaded. They start off by saying that these independent schools are siphoning off money

00:13:42.240 meant for the public schools. Well, a few years ago, we had a very careful report on the economics of this

00:13:49.840 done. And what we found, you can find this report on PCE's website, is that over an eight year period,

00:13:58.560 those charter schools, public or private schools and home education between them, save close to two

00:14:06.080 billion dollars. And you know, over the course of time, 250 million dollars a year really kind of adds up.

00:14:13.120 But we're not spending less as the province of Alberta because of it. That money, which was 250

00:14:24.720 million dollars a year then, and is probably closer to 400 million now, subsidizes the public school

00:14:32.000 system. Every penny we're not spending on those independent schools goes to the public school system.

00:14:39.200 Put it another way, 50,000 students collect operational funding for 35,000 students. If we abolish the

00:14:48.560 independent schools, we suck funding for 15,000 students out of the public school system.

00:14:56.560 Right, right.

00:14:57.760 Also, the independent schools get virtually nothing for capital funding. So the public system would have to

00:15:06.880 pay for new schools for those people, for those 50,000 students.

00:15:13.200 Oh, okay. Oh, right, right, right.

00:15:14.720 It gets worse. Now, that's 50,000 students who are almost entirely from working class families.

00:15:24.480 They would all be forced to go to the public system if we got rid of the funding for the independent

00:15:30.400 schools. Okay. So we've got about 30,000 classrooms. That would be about 31,500, 32,000 classrooms, right,

00:15:43.840 in total in public education in Alberta. So about 32,000 if we added the populations of the independent

00:15:50.480 schools. There's 48,000 students in those independent schools. So we would be adding one and a half students

00:15:59.200 per classroom to the public system. Let me be a little more specific. Very few of those independent

00:16:08.080 schools are in rural regions. So this would be Edmonton and Calgary. And in Edmonton and Calgary,

00:16:15.040 we would be adding two students to every classroom. And every one of those students would come from

00:16:22.320 families that are angry that their students are forced to be in your classroom. Do you want to

00:16:31.200 teach that as a teacher? I don't think I'd want to be in that position. This is not a reasonable

00:16:40.000 proposition. This is crazy talk. Yeah. And also the way you put it as well, I don't understand why

00:16:47.360 teachers would be in support of that if they, you know, know how it's going to work. Like if they're

00:16:53.040 going to, like the kids are going to come to their classrooms, that's more work for them. And it's

00:16:57.520 probably like you said, a dissatisfied parent. So do you think like teachers are in support of this or

00:17:04.640 yeah? Well, it's very easy, especially if you've got a lot of money as the ATA does to push a simple

00:17:12.160 slogan, public money for public schools. And so everyone goes, well, of course, public money

00:17:18.880 should go for public schools. It shouldn't go for private schools. And so everyone's full of the

00:17:24.720 slogan, but we don't see the ramifications. And we also don't see that the slogan is completely false.

00:17:32.640 You see, there's nothing private about private schools in Alberta, nothing.

00:17:37.040 Private schools, unlike public schools, get inspectors. They adhere to the Alberta program

00:17:47.760 of studies. They're fully accountable to the provincial government, to the extent that as

00:17:56.160 Minister David Aiken displayed some years ago, the province can not just dictate what clubs they can

00:18:03.760 have and have not. They can dictate what wording can be used in their founding documents. Mr. Aiken

00:18:11.840 sent out a series of letters about those founding documents, in which he highlighted all of the ways

00:18:18.800 in which he thought they erred and which he wanted them to change. They were commonly referred to as the

00:18:25.600 rainbow reprimands because of all the colors of pens he used. My favorite part of that was that he

00:18:31.680 always highlighted the word truth in religious schools documents, which caused me to think of

00:18:39.440 it as his pilot project. So anyhow, there's nothing private about Alberta's private schools.

00:18:47.920 Well, yeah. Let's see. What else do I have here?

00:18:58.000 I have one on Jason Schilling.

00:19:02.640 Okay. Yeah. Well, it kind of actually did touch on this already, so I think I'll skip it. But okay. Yeah.

00:19:09.040 So this week, Minister of Finance Horner, Jason Horner, yes, that's his name, did an interview on

00:19:16.800 Cori's radio talking about the ATA would require almost $2 billion more in spending than the government

00:19:24.400 had set aside for a deal. So like we were talking about before, where I said they might be waiting,

00:19:29.840 the government might be waiting the ATA out. And you said, yeah, but it depends on what's going to be

00:19:35.280 announced. But so the clear question is, do you think that they're going to add more money or do you not?

00:19:43.440 Okay. The problem that we're facing is that the government of Alberta is largely dependent on

00:19:52.080 resource revenue. Resource revenue is very volatile and it partly depends, of course, on future prospects.

00:20:00.800 And right now, projections having us running a pretty massive deficit, $6.5 billion.

00:20:09.360 We're already in a situation where we have a pretty big debt. And needless to say, someone like

00:20:16.320 Nate Horner is not keen to add to that debt. So when he's talking about another $2.6 billion already,

00:20:24.320 he's looking and saying, we're adding this to the debt, because that's the position we're in. Does

00:20:30.320 he want to almost double that? No, he doesn't. He's probably thinking we're better off to just wait

00:20:36.560 on them to make a deal. Because the calculus for him doesn't work. And he really is the whip hand in this.

00:20:46.800 We don't have more money than we have. The minister of education can't spend money that

00:20:55.760 Horner won't give him. Right. Right. And so that's the wall that we run up against. And

00:21:04.080 looking at the numbers, I can't say I disagree with Horner. We would all like to solve all of the

00:21:11.360 problems we're seeing at once. But the ATA isn't being realistic. They need to narrow their goals.

00:21:18.400 Solve this problem now. Other problems tomorrow. So basically look more long term.

00:21:27.520 Yes, that's correct. If they weren't trying to solve everything right now through strike action

00:21:33.760 that they never prepared for, well, they didn't. They already pirated half their strike fund to make

00:21:41.280 a political slush fund. Right. They weren't prepared for this strike. So this is not the time to push for

00:21:50.480 that. This is the time to limit objectives and come back to the other things later. It would also help

00:21:57.120 if they tried to not emulate a rival political party. It's a lot easier to negotiate when you're not

00:22:05.840 quite so confrontational with the people you're trying to negotiate with. Yeah. I think that should

00:22:12.560 be a rule. So anyways. Okay. Well, thank you, John. I appreciate very much that you came in today. I

00:22:18.160 think it was very informative and I think lots of parents will appreciate this as well. So. Okay.

00:22:22.560 Thanks very much. Yeah. No problem. So if you guys enjoyed this video whatsoever, you should

00:22:27.760 subscribe to our YouTube channel, Western Standard. And you can also check out our website,

00:22:32.320 westernstandard.news, where you can subscribe for $10 a month or $100 a year. Yeah. So that's it.

00:22:40.000 Thank you very much, everyone. And bye-bye.

Western Standard - October 20, 2025

Is the Alberta Teachers' Association strike almost over？

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