Front Burner - Is Alberta headed for a general strike?

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Earlier this week Danielle Smith’s UCP government forced teachers back to work after a a three week strike using the notwithstanding clause. This prevents the Alberta Teachers' Association from challenging the legislation in court.In response, the Alberta Federation of Labour announced that the wheels are in motion for a possible general strike by the province's unions.Provincial affairs reporter for CBC Edmonton, Janet French, walks us through how these negotiations got to this point, what’s at stake for teachers, students and the government and where this fight could be headed.We'd love to hear from you! Complete our  listener survey here.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

It's sneaky, underhanded. They don't want us to talk about it. But in Canada, beer tax increases are automatic. They go up automatically, yes. Even though at 46%, Canada already imposes the highest beer taxes of any country in the G7. Don't they realize automatic is not democratic? To help stop it, go to hereforbear.ca. And ask yourself, why does the best beer nation have the worst beer taxation?

This is a CBC podcast. Hey, everybody. I'm Jamie Poisson. Daniel Smith has awakened a sleeping giant. She has provided us with a rallying cry. We now have one common purpose, and that purpose is to topple this government. So that's Gil McGowan, head of Alberta Federation of Labor, announcing that the wheels are in motion for a possible general strike by the province's unions. They are furious over Premier Daniel Smith's decision to force striking teachers back to work earlier this week. Now, the Smith government is using its legislative majority to steamroll over the opposition.

They're using the notwithstanding clause to see. sidestep the Constitution and the courts, that leaves citizens and civil society as the final bulwark against Daniel Smith's dangerous agenda for our province. No one is coming to our rescue. It is up to us. At the core of this ongoing battle is Daniel Smith's youth of the notwithstanding clause, which prevents the Alberta Teachers Association from challenging the legislation in court. Today, Janet French is here. She is a provincial affairs reporter for CBC Edmonton. She's going to walk us through how these negotiations got to this point.

What is at stake for teachers, their students and the government, and where this fight could be headed. Janet, hey, it's great to have you. Thanks for having me. So let's talk a bit about how we got here, hey? These negotiations have been taking place for over a year now, as I understand it. What have the teachers been asking for? Right. So the main points, as you might imagine, are wages, improved conditions in schools, and

teachers wanting a manageable workload. When it comes to wages, inflation in Alberta has risen approximately 21% here since 2019. And the Alberta Teachers Association, the ATA's argument, is over that time they've had new raises is of about 3.8%. So what they want are wage increases that not only keep up with future inflation, but also account for past inflation. They also say that the workload itself has increased dramatically. So if you were to look at how many hours or how much effort or time they're spending on their work, that's also a pay cut per amount of effort expended because the sheer demand on the school system has really exponentially increased, not just from population growth,

but also from demands of implementing new curriculum in multiple subjects. And the number of kids who have additional needs are not fluent in English, they might have behavioral challenges, mental health challenges, medical needs, disabilities. The numbers of kids who are coming with those diagnoses or those needs are rising. And so these teachers feel like they're handling more and more and more demands that they're not equipped to deal with. So what they want is some kind of legal mechanism written, like a student-teacher ratio or class size or computer.

complexity cap, and the Alberta government has point-blank refused to talk about it. And they've accused the Teachers Association, in turn, of being very inflexible on this point. And I know that Teachers Association has been talking a lot about how they feel that the government is purposely eroding the public school system. And just can you talk to me a little bit about that claim and where it comes from? Yeah, this dates back right to the beginning of when the UCP was first elected under Jason Kenney in 2019. And one of the principals that he was really hot on is school choice. This model is one of the great legacies of past progressive conservative governments. And basically, it comes down to this. We in Alberta believe that moms and dads make better

decisions for their children's education than big bureaucracies and unions. We don't think bureaucracies and unions should have a monopoly on parents' tax dollars in the education system. So Alberta has the highest public level of private school funding in the country. And private school enrollment really exploded at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic because a lot of people were switching to homeschooling or smaller environments. And private schools supervise a lot of these home education programs. Sure, some kids learn best in a regular public school environment. But others learn better and flourish in specialized programs or in charter schools.

And indeed, in independent schools, in faith-based schools at home schools, the idea of school choice is to embrace our Canadian belief in pluralism and also to have a healthy dose of competition in the education sector. There's also a growth in immigration, and some families are looking for very specific religious or cultural schools. So that has also increased enrollment in the private school system where more of those programs are available. And Alberta also has an educational system quirk, which is charter schools.

This was created in the 1990s. It was supposed to be this kind of experimental limited network of these publicly funded schools where educators could test out unique philosophical approaches to education. And if they were successful, they were supposed to be replicated in public schools across the province. That did not happen in any kind of coordinated way. And so Jason Kenney, he passed this act and changed the regulations and the rules around charter schools. The Choice in Education Act that says for the first time in Alberta law that we, recognized as a fundamental human right that parents have the first say in how best to educate their

children. He lifted the cap off the number of charter school organizations in the province. It used to be a maximum of 15. There are now 29 charter school authorities running 48 different schools. We have created new charter schools, getting back to Alberta's tradition of innovation and competition to drive better results. And I think most importantly, we, I stood before you in May of 2018 to say that we would stop the NDP's ideological left-wing politicized rewrite of the school curriculum. We kept our word. But public education advocates are really angry about this because they say it's increasingly siphoning, it might have just been a little bit of money at the start, but it's increasingly

siphoning it away from the public system. And the public system is compelled to accept all students who arrive on their doorsteps. The private schools and charter schools are not. They can create wait lists. They can limit enrollment and they can say, sorry, your student isn't the right type of student to come to our school. There's also these additional demands on teachers based on education policy in Alberta. So we saw a series of bills that some people feel really erode the rights of as LGBTQ plus kids or trans kids. Members of Alberta's governing United Conservative Party are to debate a resolution surrounding gender pronouns in school. and parental consent.

The resolution notes Saskatchewan and New Brunswick are implementing similar rules. We've got teachers now who are required to ask students what their assigned gender was at birth to decide if they can play on girls' sports teams.

We've got teachers checking up on, you know, calling parents about whether their kids wants to change their pronoun. So this has really changed the culture of education in Alberta. So it's within this broader context that you've just like, out that the teachers voted down one proposal back in May, right? Then at the end of September, a tentative agreement was voted down by 90% of the teachers. That last deal would have, as I

understand it, or according to the government, included would have included pay raises of at least 12% with 95% of teachers making up to 17% more, a 20% boost to substitute teacher rates, promises to hire 3,000 new teachers and 1,500 new educational assistants. So lots of stuff on the table here. And so why was the deal ultimately rejected? Yeah, that's what Danielle Smith says that teachers will be earning. But there's much more nuance there. It's not the whole story.

The number she's quoting are for teachers who have six years of post-secondary education. And that is not most teachers. The standard they use to compare teacher salaries across the country are teachers who have five years of post-secondary experience. But there's another twist. As part of this contract, and the parties agree on this point that there are 61 school boards in Alberta that have 61 different salary grids. And they want to move to a unified grid, but how to do that and when to do that is what there's a dispute on. So, they do agree that most teachers will move to a higher salary grid because it would be a bit unfair to say, sorry, we're changing salary grids and you go to a lower one. So one of the goals is to get

everybody on the Grand Prairie public schools grid. And that's where these extra little salary bumps come from for some teachers is that their grids and their pay bans are low enough that they would see up to 5% increases. Others are going to get zero and others aren't changing grids yet at all. So it's really all over the math. As for the 3,000 extra teachers and the 1,500 extra educational assistants, teachers have pushed back hard against this. They say there are more than 2,000 schools in Alberta. So just simple math, obviously they wouldn't be distributed. distributed evenly, but that's still only maybe one or two teachers per school, on average, maybe one EA, and they're saying, you know, there are some schools that need five or six

more teachers, five or six more EAs. So the teachers say these concessions aren't good enough, they go on strike October 6th, 51,000 teachers walk off the job. That affects over 750,000 kids who have been stuck at home, which, you know, must be fun for all their parents. The next week, the province offered up an enhanced mediation process that would have sent everyone back to classrooms, but the association, the Teachers Association rejected that offer because hard caps on class sizes and student teacher ratios would not be part of that discussion. And why would that be excluded from the negotiations. That's a question that I would love a comprehensive answer to, and that has not been

provided. And when we've asked the finance minister and the premier, what they tell us is the union is not being flexible by insisting on these hard caps. It prompted kind of a now infamous comment from the premier that there's, quote, it's more than one way to peel a potato. She was trying out to use like a more crass analogy, and then teachers found that really insulting, and it resulted in a giant pile of protest potatoes being piled on the steps of the legislature that they then donated the food pick and protesters dressed up like Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head. And yeah, so the potato analogies are flowing. So first, the government was kind of saying, like, we have no idea what the ATA is asking for. The union's totally offside with the members and we're so

confused. So the ATA comes back to them with this super specific proposal. Like, here's a formula. Here's what we want in terms of like a gradual phased in of student teacher ratios. that accounts for students who have higher needs being weighted higher in this formula. And that was the beginning of back to work legislation. The government said, no, that's too expensive. That would cost $500 million more per year. It's unreasonable. We have a deficit.

Hard note. The other thing I want to talk to you about is that the Alberta government has made a concerted effort over the past few years to encourage Canadians to move from other provinces to Alberta. Anybody in Canada has the right to achieve the middle class dream of homovales. ownership. And that dream is alive and well in Alberta. So says the province's premier Jason Kenney while visiting Toronto last week. Blue Young Station is now wrapped, literally, with Alberta is calling messages, claiming less taxes,

cheaper homes, and more jobs. And it worked, right? Alberta's population grew more in 2023 than any year in its history. I don't know if it's because of that ad campaign, but that's what happened. The Smith government, including her education minister Demetrios, Nicolaides, have blamed the exploding class sizes on unchecked immigration from outside the country. We did, however, receive a historic amount of new Canadians flooding into the province that I know has put pressure on many other provinces. I know Premier E.B. Was there a lack of planning there? Just talk to me a little bit more about this population boom argument. Yeah. So one of the narratives has been

let's call it selectively factual. Alberta's economy has historically been at the mercy of these oil booms and busts. And there have been many of those over decades, our whole history as a province. And it doesn't just draw people who work in oil and gas here, right? It means that there's a boom and investment in universities and in research,

manufacturing, and construction and other industries that support all those industries. So lots of demand for labor, lots of lures to attract people here during those booms. And the people who move here are young, they have families or they bring kids with them. For as long as I've been covering education here, with the exception of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, enrollment has been rising at a steady pace in cities and in these bedroom communities around Evanston, Calgary, even in like Red Deer, Grand Prairie. School divisions are adding the equivalent of one or two large high schools worth of students to their divisions each year. And during

the Alberta is calling campaign that growth accelerated. You mentioned 2023 and even 2024 were years of exceptional population growth because housing was so much more affordable here. Was affordable here. But the problem existed before that boom. So school boards have been begging, pleading for new suburban schools for more than a decade. And no government of any stripe has been willing or able to keep up with the demand to build those schools in suburban areas where we're seeing the most growth. There's since been this $8.6 billion promise that you'll hear from government officials a lot

to build 90 schools, but it's going to take up to seven years to build all those schools. And some schools are absolutely maxed out on portable and modular classrooms. They legally and physically cannot add more. And so what we're hearing now is we can't have class size caps because there's no space. But educators will say that's not true. Even if you put two teachers in a class of 45 or 50, that still makes a difference to the experience, educational experience that children are receiving. Of the seven great nations that make up the G7,

it is Canada that imposes the highest taxes on beer. 46% of what Canadians pay for beer is government taxation. When the G7 leaders get together, I bet Canada doesn't brag. about that. Enough is enough. Help stop automatic beer tax hikes. Go to hereforbeer.ca. And ask yourself,

why does the best beer nation have the worst beer taxation? As an insurance broker, your customers count on you. From the simple, turnkey business quote to the highly complicated unique risks that require tenured experience and knowledge to hash out.

You need a partner whose appetite and capacity for commercial insurance is bigger than you think. Our in-house experts work with you to curate the perfect policy. Simple or complex, at Intact Insurance, we have the comprehensive commercial solution you need. From manufacturing to contractors, liability to commercial fleet. We have the trusted expertise in solutions you and your customers deserve. Contact your dedicated underwriter today.

For simple to complex and everything in between. Intact Insurance. So this all brings us to Monday, right? So they've been on strike. It's been very disruptive, I'm sure, for people all across the province. And the province moves to order the teachers back to work. And significantly, they use the notwithstanding clause to do it, which is this kind of get out of jail free card essentially around the charter of rights that provinces have. It's very controversial. We talked about it on the show many times before. The notwithstanding clause allows governments to override certain charter rights. Its use is rare. The teachers' union is exploring legal options, including an emergency injunction. There's a lot of people who believe that provinces are using it too much in recent years.

In 2019, Quebec invoked the clause to prevent public employees from wearing religious symbols. And in 2023, Saskatchewan used it for legislation about sex education, education in schools and notifying parents when students change their name or pronouns. Why would the province need to use the notwithstanding clause here? So the government will tell you that the use of that clause was absolutely necessary in this situation. And they say that it's due to the unique way the teachers bargain in Alberta. I don't want to go too into the weeds, but there's a multi-phase process for teachers to get their working conditions established. So the big ticket items like salary are bargained at a central

table with representatives from the governments and the school boards. That's the stage route right now. There's a whole other layer of bargaining that happens later where teachers negotiate with their school boards for things like, how much time do they spend on lunch supervision? What about money for continued education and training? Now, teachers can and have gone on strike over those local issues. So the government was worried that these angry teachers who felt wronged would then use that local bargaining as an excuse to go on strike again because of their dissatisfaction with the provincial agreement. So they basically hit freeze.

Not only the province imposed this provincial contract, but now these local contracts, the local portion of their contract, is frozen until September 2028. And our finance minister, Nate Horner just said, we'd have no appetite for further strikes or disruption. Are there people who think that they could have ordered them back to work

and not use the notwithstanding clause? Absolutely. Labor experts say that that could have happened, that there could have passed back to work, and then demanded the teachers attend binding arbitration or have them go back to mediation with enhanced mediation or something to guide them. I mean, I think what they were afraid of was that they would have been roped into binding arbitration and then being told you can't negotiate class size caps or people teacher ratios in that process. I don't think anybody was expecting the imposition of a contract. Daniel Smith is out there making the argument that she had to do this for the

sake of the kids, right? That they've been out of school for three weeks and that they already have missed a ton of school and classroom time during the pandemic. We know and feel like this is the right bargaining decision. So I would just hope that people would look at their own personal circumstances and just give an honest assessment of whether they think it's fair. Most of the parents I talk to, they think it's fair. Many of the teachers who've contacted us, they think it's fair. And I think most of all, it's fair to the students who are the ones who are most impacted. Do you have a sense of where Albertans are on this issue right now? Are they on side with her or are they on side with the teachers?

So there's a recent Angus Reid poll that's just in early October and in the first week of the strike. It was online. It was around 800 Albertans. And it suggested 58% of people were sympathetic to the teachers. And about a third of that number was sympathetic to the government in this dispute. The rest didn't take a side or they just didn't know. And it wasn't just NDP supporters. As you know, we have a very like dual party. system politics in Alberta right now, UCP and NDP, 28% of UCP voters said that their

sympathies were lying with the teachers. And I think it's because parents and grandparents can see with their own eyes what's going in schools, right? They know education workers, they know teachers, and they hear the stories about what they're experiencing. That's really interesting to see that number, the 28% among her base. Smith has said that what the government has offered has been done all in the face of economic challenges for the provinces, right? She made this video explaining why they were ordering them back to work. Tonight we want to speak directly to our province's parents and teachers. On behalf of your provincial government, we want to share the steps that we've taken today to get students

and teachers back in the classroom. As global energy prices continue to be lower than forecast and the market continues to be unpredictable, we cannot say whether situation will improve or worsen. However, despite... What do you make of how she's framing that? How is that landing? Yeah, and I'd say the finance minister repeated that message during the bill. The very long night we spent on the legislature until two in the morning, getting this bill passed through to get it done. And the next day, I asked the finance minister, and the education minister, why is the education of Alberta children contingent on the price of oil? And they denied that. They said, oh, no, you know, it's international test results are consistently good from Alberta. But

This government has many, many revenue levers outside of oil and gas. For example, the renewal energy industry was exploding here a couple of years ago. And then the government put in a lot of restrictions that really limited the expansion of that industry. And it spooked a lot of investors. And this is a government and a population in Alberta that abhors taxes, so just allergic. And the province gave Albertans an income tax cut last year. So I guess it's a question of balance. Do people want to have the lowest tax environment in the country

or do they want robust public services consistently when oil prices are not high? That's something that voters have to decide. You mentioned before how people were surprised by the imposition of the contract and, of course, the use of the not, Withstanding Clause, how controversial that is, Nahid Nenshi, the Alberta Ndipa opposition leader has vowed that if he becomes Premier of Alberta, he would never use it.

When Alberta's New Democrats become the government of Alberta, inshallah, God willing, as I always say, we will never, ever use the notwithstanding clause. And one of our first acts as government will be to introduce legislation restricting the use of that clause for all future Alberta governments. Because we believe in human rights for everyone. We believe in freedom, for everyone, not just when it's convenient. Gail McGowan, the head of the Alberta Labor Federation, says that the UCP is, quote, stretching the bounds of our democratic norms by invoking it. And do you think that this is now becoming an issue that people are really willing to rally behind?

Or do you think that they're also just happy that the kids are back in school? I think that's what we're about to find out. Like, obviously, like you mentioned, there's been a lot of anger from other public and private sector. unionized workers. The question is how much momentum does that anger and that sense of grievance have? How long will it last? How far are they willing to go when there's penalties and fines potentially hanging over their head for any illegal strike action? I would point out that the government did in fact not campaign on going to war with teachers during the 2020-23 election campaign. They campaigned on increasing choice in the education system and beefing up avenues to the skilled trades

and opportunities earlier on. It campaigned on keeping public spending below inflation plus population growth, which really does make it a problem to get adequate funding into the education system if that's your policy, right? And now we're hearing, you know, you heard at the beginning of the show those quotes from Gail McGowan from the Alberta Federation Labor, you know, he suspected that the government would use the notwith Scanning Clause and he promised in advance an unprecedented response and making air quotes from unionized workers, but they're not just like one.

cohesive group, right? Each union considers itself a democratic organization, so they'll have to be decisions within each union, whether they would participate in something like a general strike. And also some unions just signed deals with the government that they don't want to put at risk, right? So if a union is getting close to taking a strike vote, maybe they'll happily join the fight. But then other workers might be more a fear of penalties. And we talked to a labor lawyer yesterday who said, if you're doing this, if you're trying to stage a general strike, you need to act fast, like while the public is on side, while the public is angry and it's fresh in their minds. So is it fair for me to say that, you know, in one scenario, we could see hundreds of

thousands of workers join in solidarity here and go on this general strike. And in other scenarios, this could be kind of a much weaker version of that, if at all. Yeah. It really depends. So, you know, Gil McGowan was talking about we're going to get, we got to get 250,000, 350,000, 450,000 workers out at the same time, right? It's got to be cross sectors. And it only would work if they were able to overwhelm any of the systems of penalty, right? If it just became administratively impossible to detain or fine or send that many people before the labor relations board to the point where the system is like, we can't deal with this. That's the only scenario in which I think they would do it when they feel like they have enough volume of support that they'd be able to

stage something of that magnitude. And I would imagine if something like, that were to happen, if they were able to get that kind of momentum, that that would be a massive, massive crisis for the UCP government, right? And so what are you kind of hearing? Like, where do you think that this is most likely to go at the moment? And I know that that can be an unfair question to ask people like you sometimes because I'm asking you to kind of do the crystal ball thing. But, you know, you're on the ground. Like, what's the vibe? I'd say the messaging yesterday was a little confusing from the from the from the afl that like I think a lot a lot of people were hoping to hear like yeah general strike now but that's an incredibly rare and complicated thing to organize right

and involves potentially non-unionized workers being on side so that's not going to happen overnight and I guess we'll see I get I'm still kind of trying to get a sense of how angry the average person is does the average citizen care when a certain group's rights are violated right and how much do they care and how much does that mobilize them? Yes, the kind of evergreen criticism of the notwithstanding clause, you should care when it happens to someone else because it might be coming for you down the line. I think that's a good place for us to end this conversation. This is really interesting.

Janet, thank you so much for this. You're welcome. All right, that is all for today. day. Front burner was produced this week by Joytha Shungupta, Matt Mews, Matthew Amha, Lauren Donnelly, Mackenzie Cameron, Sam McNulty, and Dave Modi. Our YouTube producer is John Lee. Our music producer is Joseph Chabison. Our senior producer is Elaine Chow. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe Locos, and I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening and talk to you next week. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.