Shaun Newman Podcast - #946 - Caylan Ford & Bruce Pardy

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

I’m joined by Caylan Ford and Bruce Pardy to discuss the Alberta Teachers Strike.Caylan Ford is the founder of Canada’s fastest-growing tuition-free classical charter school network, Alberta Classical Academy. A former federal policy advisor with degrees from Calgary, George Washington, and Oxford. She also co-produced award-winning documentaries exposing human rights abuses. In 2019, she was a rising UCP star candidate until a leaked private chat about cultural preservation was weaponized as “white supremacy,” forcing her resignation within hours; she’s now suing for defamation. Bruce Pardy is a Queen’s University law professor, executive director of the law-and-liberty think-tank Rights Probe, and one of Canada’s sharpest classical-liberal critics of the “managerial state.” A former Bay Street litigator and decade-long adjudicator on Ontario’s Environmental Review Tribunal, he now writes and speaks on the front lines of the legal culture war—defending individual autonomy, free markets, property rights, and the rule of law against what he calls the “Unholy Trinity” of bureaucracy, human-rights tribunals, and activist courts.Tickets to Cornerstone Forum 26’: https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone26/Tickets to the Mashspiel:https://www.showpass.com/mashspiel/Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Use the code “SNP” on all ordersProphet River Links:Website: store.prophetriver.com/Email: [e-mail] your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

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Let's get on to that tale of the tape. Our first guest is the founder of Alberta Classical Academy. Our second is a professor of law at Queens University. I'm talking about Kalin Ford and Bruce Party. So buckle up, here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Kaelin Ford and Bruce Party. I'm finding out a lot about you two and the fact you know each other, which is great.

I thought this would be a fun conversation with the Alberta teacher strike, albeit in the rear view mirror now as kids are back in school. But there's been a whole lot of different things come out. So I guess first off, Kailen, Bruce, thanks for hopping on the podcast today. Great to be with you, Sean. Thanks for the invitation. I guess the notwithstanding clause gets used. And maybe I'll start with Bruce.

Kaelin, please hop in here whenever you feel. But there's been a whole bunch of talk now about the not with standing clause. Bruce says, war on the workers. And the ATA coming out saying, you know, this is abuse of power. And, you know, they've been releasing polls that show majority of people agree with the teachers and not the government and blah, blah, blah. the not with standing clause. Maybe we could just start there and your thoughts on the use of it. Oh, I think Danielle Smith and the UCP are entirely within their proper rights to do, to use the notwithstanding clause.

I think it's an entirely legitimate thing. It is part of the charter. So critics will notwithstanding clause say, oh, you can't use a notwithstanding clause. It will undermine the charter. It is part of the charter. It is part of the deal that was made to put the charter into being. It's part of the architecture of the charter and the Constitution. It is basically the last vestige of legislative supremacy as far as the charter goes.

Before we had the charter, the legislatures had the last word on things, essentially. And now the courts have the last word on things under the charter. And Section 33 was put in there to give the legislatures the last. word in some circumstances and the critics of the Lottwithstanding clause want restrictions to be put on its use that are not in the text of the charter which is not the deal that was made right so I got no problem with the Alberta government using it I in this circumstance or in lots of others in fact I've gone so far as to say that the courts in this country have have taken on their supremacy so enthusiastically and wander out there outside their lane so willingly that I wouldn't look badly upon a government

that basically said we're using the notwithstanding clause all the time because we don't trust our courts. Yeah, this is a very novel experience, Sean, as I mentioned. I for once agree with everything that Bruce has said, except Bruce, you kind of seem to be going down the road of saying that with the charter we now have judicial supremacy, but no, because of Section 33, that's supposed to preserve the supremacly of the democratically elected legislature. And again, I think there's something terribly sad and irresponsible about the way that the use of Section 33, the notwithstanding clause, gets invoked. I heard from a friend yesterday that they were saying her son's biology teacher was sort

of in tears at being forced back to work and said, you know, this basically, this is an authoritarian government that is undermined. that is taking away my rights and I'm refusing to teach. And so this person was obviously distressed, but they're distressed because they've been misinformed about what's happening. So for one, again, democracy means that democratically elected lawmakers are the ones who make the laws,

and the people have recourse to hold them accountable if they disagree with what they do. So when, for example, Daniel Smith's government legislates teachers back, to work. If teachers are not happy with that, they have the opportunity to vote them out and vote in a different government. That's democracy. What is not democratic is where courts get to say, no, democratically elected lawmakers don't get to do this because we're going to have a freewheeling interpretation of the Constitution and are basically going to take to take lawmaking into our own hands. And that's what the Supreme Court has been doing. And so as Bruce said, the preservation of

democracy under these circumstances actually requires elected governments to start using the notwithstanding clause a heck of a lot more. In this case, we're dealing with a constitutional right to strike, which was not a constitutional right until 2015 when the Supreme Court and defiance of all previous jurisprudence just sort of said out of thin air, we're going to give benediction to this right out of nowhere just because they wanted to. So that's why the notwithstanding clause now was attached to this back-to-work legislation because the Supreme Court has invented a new constitutional right in very recent memory. So 2015, sorry Bruce, 2015 up until that point, there was no right to strike, now there's a right to

strike, it's protected, and that's where all the anger is coming from. And when you say misinformed, maybe some of the people who don't fully understand what's going on. And this point is very important. So the charter, this is all under Section 2D of the charter, the right of association. The Section 2 rights are supposed to be written as negative rights, as in the right to be free from government interference. So if the government leaves you alone, they are fulfilling Section 2 rights, Section 2D association rights. And the Supreme Court comes along, just as Kaelin has said, and invents a positive right

to a collective bargaining process in the right to strike, meaning you are entitled, you are entitled to require your provincial government to legislate you these particular kinds of rights. And so the need to use the notwithstanding clause in this situation would not exist without the activism of the Supreme Court. So, so the, the, the, the, the, the, the argument is, is, is specious. It's, it makes no sense. If, if the charter had been interpreted by the court to mean what it says, then the notwithstanding clause would not need to be used here.

It is, it is all a court produced problem. Forgive me for asking this stupid question, but you have the, the charter gets written out. What gives courts? The, I don't, I don't know what word to use next. So you two just may be filling in. Is it right or obligation or whatever? Power. Power.

Power. The word is power. Sure. What gives them the power to do that? The lack of any other power to stop them. If you want to be literal, if you want to be literal, here's the technical legal reason why the courts do whatever they want. Because there is nothing to stop them.

In particular, we're talking about the Supreme Court of Canada. The Supreme Court of Canada, you know, we think that judicial decisions are restricted, you know, by precedent and reasoning and principles of statutory interpretation and logic. Those are more apparent than real. The Supreme Court of Canada can actually come to whatever decision it wants because it cannot be appealed and it can't be overturned as far as the charter is concerned. So they have the final word except for the notwithstanding clause, right? So it is simply a function of power. There is nothing, there's no check and balance to stop them from doing essentially whatever they want. Including they're not democratically elected.

Correct. And I think this is, again, this is a compelling reason why we should cleave to some idea of legislative or even executive supremacy rather than judicial supremacy. Because if the courts make bad decisions that are clear, purely irrational that are offensive to sort of basic moral sensibilities of the people, there's no recourse. And we should add that under the Canadian constitution, it is the federal government that appoints judges to the highest courts in each of the provinces. Right.

So in Alberta, which is, you know, one of the most right-leaning provinces in the country, the judges have been appointed over the past decade by the liberal government in Ottawa to Alberta's courts. How long is an appointment? Oh, well, Supreme Court of Canada until 75. So you could be appointed. Let's say you're appointed Supreme Court of Canada in your mid-50s. You'll sit on the court for 20 years. Okay, I'm going to wrap my brain around this.

I feel like maybe I'm just the layman here, probably am. you get given in the courts you get given a set of laws that you're supposed to abide by and what i'm hearing and i feel like i've heard this before out of maybe both you is now what you have is interpretation of it not actually what it says so this isn't up to date with where we are which shouldn't that be the courts going listen lawmakers we need to update these not make rulings on the way we think they should be do you want to talk about living trees bruce Sure. So the living tree is a philosophy of interpretation that they apply to both the Constitution and statutes. The living tree basically means we're going to interpret the document to mean whatever is necessary and, you know, the involving nature of our society.

What that really means is we're not subject or restricted to the texts and we'll do whatever we think is right. We're going to make social policy in accordance with the way we think society exists right now or with the way it should be. It is a signaling of judicial activism. And there are some members of the Supreme Court in particular who actually believe that it is their role, the role of this handful of justices, to be the final arbiters of moral contestations in society. And if final arbiter, sorry. They're not representative of the population, but they have decided that this is their role and their prerogative.

And it just so happens that that very phrase, the final arbiters is the phrase that now retired Justice Rosalieabella used in her op-ed and her speech to describe the proper role in her view of the Supreme Court, the final arbiters of which contested values in society should triumph. That's what they think their job is. so this only gets worse then right like this like that right there that scares me this this doesn't get better in a year's time oh no it's worse no no sure yeah what you think i mean how much has our society changed over 20 years before before they were the the above everything the power nobody can keep them in check we're going to

make the moral decisions for society. Before we had that, how much did society change in a 20-year span? Now you go in a 20-year span where you're the moral adjudicator of what should happen in society with all the pressures and activists and everything else. This only gets worse. So if I can, Sean, there's a perspective on, there's a perspective on this that I have that maybe Kaelin doesn't share. And that is everything that we've said that I, you know, we obviously agree.

on this point. But the more difficult point is this, that the contest or whether or notwithstanding clause reflects a bigger problem, which is that courts in Canada don't tend to protect individual liberties as they're written in the charter. But the problem is that neither do legislatures. So I agree with the democratic principle that legislature should have a role in this, and they shouldn't should be legitimately able to use an upwithstanding clause. But an awful lot of legislatures in Canada don't do a good job at this either. And that was the whole reason for the rationale for putting the charter in the first place, right? So I'm sure we can all think of situations where a legislature in Canada, whether it's

Parliament in Ottawa or a provincial legislature, has passed a bill or wants to pass a bill, which would be catastrophic to our ability to decide things for ourselves, like during COVID. Like lots of people tried to go to the courts during COVID to say, you know, they can't do this, right? And that's why you have a charter. So in other words, the contest over the notwithstanding clause is a contest between two bad choices, you know, be ruled by the elites in the courts or by rule, be ruled by the mob in the legislature. And neither one of those two choices is working out very well. Kaelin? I am prevaricating between whether I should raise another recent terrible Supreme Court decision

and go down that rabbit hole or if we should pull this back to teachers' strikes. Well, now I'm curious. You can't do that. You can't float a thought because now I'm curious what you're thinking of. Well, right after Daniel Smith, her government invoked the notwithstanding clause, she suggested that the federal government should also invoke the notwithstanding clause to defend their statute, the statutory mandatory minimum sentence for child pornography possession, which the Supreme Court has just said one year as a mandatory minimum for, you know,

indictable offenses of child pornography is unconstitutional. So again, they've invented this. They used sort of a ridiculous hypothetical scenario to decide that there's, you know, some far-fetchette, hypothetical in under which a one-year mandatory minimum might seem onerous. And so they've basically invented the claim that that's unconstitutional. But this is, yeah, it's a bit of attention. This is what I mean. It's going to get worse. This is not getting better anytime soon when you have that level of insanity happening, right?

Like this is just, it's getting worse. Well, can we go back to the teachers just for a moment? Yes. So my perspective on the teachers, though, is this, that the, that the conflict about the teacher's strike comes as a result of an accepted way of doing things that we don't even notice now. And it's that way of doing things that is the source of the problem, right? So what you have with the teachers and the government in Alberta are two monopolies. You have two monopolies. The government controls all the public schools and all the teaching positions in those schools.

And the union controls all the people who are going to do that work. You've got a contest between two monopolies. And this problem with the strike occurs because you've got those two monopolies fighting about who gets to dictate the terms. And the solution to that, I mean, the short-term solution may be the notwithstanding clause. Sure, that's fine. But the larger picture solution is don't have monopolies. Monoplies don't work. The government should not be providing public education.

I know that's an extreme view or are going to sound like it, but that's always what I've thought, because this is exactly the kind of problem that you get into. And the union should not have the power to control everybody who wants to teach. If you get rid of those two monopolies, then what you would get is competition, supply, and demand in a market. And then people will be paid, but they're worth.

And so, I mean, one of the very few exceptions to the monopoly of the ATA is charter schools, whose teachers are not allowed under the ATA's own bylaws to be members. So the schools that I established, for example, we were consistently in school during the teacher strike, as were, I think, all of the other charter schools in the province. But that only accounts for like 2% of the province's students. But in fairness, Kaelan, if you had wild ambitions to grow that sucker, you would be flooded with students, would you not? We do have wild ambitions and we have thousands of students on our wait list. This is a problem of access to capital. Not only Bruce does the government have a monopoly on public education, but they also don't let us even borrow money to finance our own capital projects.

we're completely dependent on them to fund them. So our expansion has to go on the timelines that the government dictates. Right, right. So in a way, this is still the government controlling this sort of outlier way of doing things in accordance with its own requirements. Yeah. I will stand corrected. I should have known you had wild ambitions.

I just looked at the wait list and I'm like, holy man, if you just went caution of the wind and opened everything up, your enrollment would go, crazy. But when you point out the fact that, you know, for a capital project, you got to rely on the government's timeline, well, then again, the handcuffs are put back on and it becomes a slower pace at what you can grow. Yeah, there's that handcuff and then there's the other, which is we're also obligated to have teachers who are certificated by the government of Alberta's, you know, the Ministry of Education certification branch, which typically means they have to have a bachelor of education degree, which is not a particularly useful degree.

And by the initial, it's very diplomatic. It's not a very useful degree. I mean, that's not a statement about the quality of the people who have that degree. It's just the degree itself is a very little utility. And there are huge opportunity costs. If you're, say, a mid-career professional or you have a doctorate in classics or physics and you want to switch into teaching in a high school classroom, you can't unless you drop out of the workforce for two years,

enroll in an education faculty, do this. degree and then go through your certification process. So that's the other major encumbrance to alternatives like ours being able to actually offer, you know, meaningfully different programming at scale. So if I understand you correct, Bruce Party couldn't come teach at your school without having a bachelor's of education. No, the Minister of Education couldn't teach in our school unless he, although he has a doctorate, unless he also went back to school for two years and got a B-Ed. dumb question i assume this is a simple albeit you get involved government so nothing's really that

simple but a simple like change in the legislature that just says oh you don't need this doesn't even need a legislative change it's a regulation they could change it with a stroke of a pen so what do i i assume you've brought this concern up they just they just glaze over and and they're like yeah sorry kaelin we're not doing any of that no actually it's been part of the UCP's election platform and mandate since 2019 to develop expedited and alternative pathways to teacher certification. And this government apparently is working on something, but I think that the timelines for any kind of change have been pushed by the teacher strike and all the related finagling. So we'll see what they eventually come up with.

Look at, you know, at a minimum, I would say right now you need, if you have an advanced degree or an already a bachelor's degree. You have to go back to school for two years to do a B-Ed. At a minimum, we should bring that back down to one year. It used to be one year. And then Ontario had an oversupply of teachers, and they decided to raise the barrier to entry to the profession by making it a two-year program.

That was not a decision driven by pedagogical needs. It was purely about managing the supply of teachers. Every other province followed. So at a minimum, we could greatly reduce those opportunity costs, cut it back down to a one-year program. But look, I'll go full Bruce Party on this. Schools should get to hire who they want. I mean, they're the ones that are ultimately accountable for their results.

They know these people. They're in a better position to assess their capabilities and their credentials than a credentialing body in Edmonton. I mean, ideally, we would just have the power to hire the people that we think best to do the job. Amen. Yeah, I'm like, okay, I'm sitting here. I'm the government in Alberta, right? got a real problem because the ATA is flex in its muscles. They say 51,000 members, whether that's 40,000, 51, whatever.

And so you can see that they're going to push as hard as they can in the government or in the, sorry, in the courts and different things like that. And Bruce, if I'm off on my thought process, please hop in. But worst case scenario, it goes five years. And then in five years time, you get the same fight starts up again, correct? I think they've been legislated back to work and the notwithstanding clause lasts for five years. So you have five in my, if I'm sitting here and I'm the Alberta government, okay. We got five years to find a way to maybe start to change the power dynamic. One of the simple ways would be making charter schools more attractive.

And what you're telling me is, well, if we could hire Bruce Party, which we can't right now, can you imagine if all of a sudden a bunch of professors started teaching in there, wouldn't people be like, say what now? And wouldn't more children go towards that avenue? Wouldn't reducing some of the roadblocks in charter schools increase the, you know, like the likelihood more kids go there? Which means if I'm reading this correctly, the ATA loses memberships and all of a sudden their power diminishes. And all their fees. So, I mean, this is one of the reasons the ATA likes to try to pick fights with charter and independent schools is for,

you know, every student who's in one of those schools, uh, they lose some of their mandatory contributions that they get from an ATA member. Um, so it's not about, I, I mean, I think a cynical read is, it's not about children. Um, it's about the, the fear that their own power, that their own bargaining power and leverage is going to be reduced if the relative share of charter school children increases. Yep.

Well, I haven't talked to, I could be wrong on this. Maybe you too know of somebody. I haven't talked to a single person yet that doesn't think a $71,000 starting wage and by your seventh year as a teacher, 100 grand, that that is a bad wage. You know, there are some difficulties in teaching with kids and everything. Yeah, and that's going up to like $117 grand. Correct. I can't think of a blue collar guy that's working around me and is going, oh yeah, that's a terrible wage. I can't, I can't think of one of them. Well, but let's not lose sight of this market point, though, Sean. So I like to think of it as this.

People say, well, you know, this professional baseball player is not worth that kind of money. Well, if you can get that kind of money, he's worth that kind of money. In other words, your value depends upon the market. It depends upon the supply and demand. If somebody needs your skills and you are one of the few people who provide those skills, then you're worth a lot of money. And if there's lots of people who can do this job, then you're not worth very much. And it's not about whether or not the number is reasonable, you know, for all of us to think, well, you know, they're getting this much money. They're doing this job. Therefore, it should be no, no, no. The reasonableness of your pay depends upon the market.

True, but it's artificially inflated when they put the constraints on competition of that's exactly what I'm saying. That's exactly the point. You cannot tell what the right price for a teacher is if you have monopolies bargaining together, right? The best policy you could make, to increase and improve the fortunes of independent schools is to get the government out of the business. As long as the government is providing education out of tax dollars, you are undermining the project of having entrepreneurial schools who are running their own show because they can't compete with quote, free services being provided by the taxpayer.

Imagine the market that you would have as an independent, private school if the government was not in the business of running public schools. Suddenly you would be able to innovate and hire the teachers that you wanted to and provide an outstanding education. And you'd you'd have people knocking down your door. But this way, it's very hard to compete in an environment where there's a big monolith out there providing stuff for free. Now, I, I haven't thought enough about my position on this Bruce to offer a rejoinder. But there might be a compelling public interest argument to say that, the state should provide this service in some way.

But that doesn't discount, I think, a lot of your other arguments about this. But I wanted to go back to the question that Sean, you sort of just alluded to, that teachers' wages are actually pretty good, right? You know, prior to this agreement, teacher wages ranged from like 60,000 for someone fresh out of university with no experience

to just over 100,000. Now at the top end, they'll be getting up to 17% more. So up to, if I've understood, 117,000 is what I'd do. Which is pretty darn good. And then additional stipends on top of that if you take leadership rules in your school, right? So, you know, potentially up to 150 if you're, say, an administrator or something.

That's not bad, considering especially that you also have benefits, ATRF added on top of that, right? health care plans, ample vacation time. It's a good job. But it is becoming an increasingly difficult job. Yes. And the real reasons why it's becoming increasingly difficult are sort of unspeakable. And this, I think, is where there is actually some value in having a collective bargaining unit, but the collective bargaining unit is not doing what they should be doing.

The real issues here that teachers will complain of in euphemistic terms are about classroom complexity. What they're actually driving at is an increased prevalence of students with serious academic, social, and behavioral issues and a massive number of new Canadians and temporary residents who don't speak the language where there are often major kind of cultural mismatches or rather at least sort of issues of miscommunication or sort of different expectations. And this massively complicates the task of teaching. If if a third or more of your students don't speak English. And yet you're supposed to teach a class of 30.

No question. No question. So what, I mean, what a collective bargaining unit should be doing in these cases is actually making the case not just provincially but federally to say that the federal government, what they're doing on immigration is having these massive knock-on effects for the provincial service providers, that that's totally unsustainable.

and that they need to, you know, rein that in. But the collective bargaining units, as far as we know, are not making that case, right? They're pretending that this is purely an issue of money and compensation, and it's not. Yes. Well, I'm like, it's interesting because if you're a part of the ATA, and I know I got some over to lovely teachers listening to this, okay, as individuals, as democracy allows us to each be able to have a voice and to vote and all the lovely things, when you remain silent on some of the biggest problems this country is facing,

they have trickle-down effect that happen in our individual workplaces, on our communities, and our roads, crime, drugs, et cetera, et cetera. And part of classroom complexity is exactly that. we've got a government that keeps bringing people in. Not to mention the side effects of a culture that is largely tied to the hip of a lot of different problems. Probably cell phones is in there as well, right? Massive. Yeah.

So screen time. Again, if I were to say, what are the major issues that contribute to difficulty in the classroom? Classroom size, it's a factor, but it's often overstated as a factor. You can actually do very effective teaching with quite large class sizes if you use the right pedagogical approaches. Really hard to do that, though, if your students are at vastly different levels, if some of them don't speak English, if some of them are highly disruptive, right? So it's not really an issue of classroom sizes as much as it is about complexity.

And so complexity comes from, I mean, there's a handful of things. One, obviously, English language learners. Very difficult to provide effective differentiation. Another is the policy of inclusion that has been sort of the official ideology that teachers colleges teach. It's one of the criteria against which all Alberta teachers are judged in the teacher quality standards is about sort of social inclusion. There's no evidence that these practices, and by inclusion I mean that students with very acute special needs are put into regular classrooms. This has been the orthodoxy over the last several years. it doesn't work.

It's an abject failure. It doesn't serve any students. It's a nightmare for teachers, but often they feel uncomfortable saying that because no one wants to be seen as opposing inclusion, right? So the sort of the whole ideology of inclusion, which is totally without, you know, it's just not backed by any kind of solid evidence.

It's aspirational. Also, disruptive behavior is a huge amount of it is screen time. So, I mean, why don't we have a full court press to try to educate parents about the deleterious impacts of screen time? No matter how good your school is, you can't compete with a student going home and spending four hours on video games every night. Just can't compete. Doesn't matter how good your curriculum is, how good your instruction is. That child doesn't acquire the capacity to regulate themselves emotionally. They can't self-soothe. They can't calm down. They can't sit still. They can't focus. All of that's been shot by the screen time.

And then obviously the mass immigration. And I mean, another factor is insofar as this is a matter of wages, teachers, the value of their dollar has been depleted because of inflation. Why are they continuing to vote for a party that continues to drive up inflation? Like it's, you know, many of these problems stem from federal government policies. Why aren't they concerned about that? One might say self-inflicted. Yes, Bruce.

Oh, I don't disagree with any of that. It makes a lot of sense to me, but I have a larger, as you might expect, I have a larger complaint. And that is that we resort to wanting to talk about policy. Now, in the system that we have with the situation that we're in, sure, there's a lot of bad policy that could be much, much better. But resort to policy is resort to authority, because policy is nothing but a set of rules set by somebody who's above you. And when we say we should have better policy, we're saying that the people in the bureaucracy who run the show should be, should be making different decisions. And my point is that the decisions should be made not by a bureaucracy, not by a government, by parents, first of all, for their own kids and the schools and the teachers that those parents send the kids to. I mean, this is nothing to do with the public.

This has everything to do with individual children who have parents and teachers. And that is the circle within which the decisions about that child education should be made. Not officials, not bureaucrats and not offices and not ministers. I mean, if you get rid of the idea of policy, part of our problem is we believe in having debates about policy. But policy debates assume a certain number of things. that are actually not true, like, that governments seek out the best results for their citizens, that they're persuaded by evidence, that they're rational and reasonable. These things are not true.

If we accept the power of officials to make policy, then you're bound to get bad policy. Let me put it this way. Is there anything that you can think of in modern-day Canada that comes? that governments do well. I used to think there was a bunch. Yeah. But then I met people such as yourselves, and I'm not spitting out any ideas right now.

If the answer is no, then it's not a matter of bad policy or better policy. It is a problem of the power to make policy. Get the government out of the business of making policy about how your children's lives should go. Well, do you see that coming any time soon, Bruce? No, I do not. I do not.

In order to get there, in order to have any shot of getting there, we have to understand what the problem is and what the goal is. Now, I understand that in the immediate future, that's not on the table. But people are not even thinking about it in that way. They're thinking about whether or not the government or the union should prevail in this fight. I mean, like, that's not the point.

But where we sit, I guess I look at it and I go, even if you're sitting and once again, I'm sitting there and I'm the Alberta government, I go, okay, I want to get out of the business of education. If I do that overnight, people will lose their uncontrollable shit. Full stop. Yes. So then you go, okay, the best we can do over the next five years until this thing ends is we could reduce the power of the ATA.

And self-explanatory is the explosion of homeschooling charter private school. I think those are the three other options. Why don't you just take all the restraints off all those things? But that's what I'm saying. You could, you could, if all it is a signature and you could all of a sudden start reducing it, because I've heard Daniel Smith talk about how she wants the funding to follow the child. Correct. Like I'm not often saying that.

So you go, okay, you've just had this fight. You can see how they're lining it up for every union you come after you. You could sit there and go, well, why don't we with a stroke of a pen, reduce some of the handcuffs on Kainlin's. and others make it more easily accessible for them to grow. And if they grow, that means kids leave, which means there's less jobs. And if you're a teacher, you're going to go where the work is. And you get attracted to a different form of education. And in five years time, now you can start to build the scenario where the Alberta government

can just step a little bit back out of it. Now, that takes some vision, some time, a whole bunch of things. But just I don't disagree with like you got to identify the root cause of the problem and try and address it. It's just that that one takes years to get to, doesn't it? But I like that strategy. Sean, that makes a lot of sense to me as long as it's done with purpose. I mean, if that's the purpose is to get to the end result and you think you have to do it strategically in a step by step way, fair enough. That's great.

But as long as all these things are not stop gap measures, that are just forgotten after you get there. I'll, I diagnose the root cause of this differently than Bruce. I don't think that power is necessarily an evil. I don't think that lawmakers are necessarily bad. Not, I don't know if that's what you're saying, Bruce, if you'd go quite so far. But I would diagnose a large part of the problem as we have malformed elites. And we have, we've had a couple generations of malformed elites.

When you say, can you think of anything that the government does well? Increasingly, like Sean, I have to say no. And I think a lot of that, I mean, I think we have a massive crisis of competence that is just now starting to become a parent, but is, you know, at least one or two generations in the making and will only get worse. Very hard to find actually competent people. And that's going to get a lot worse. So part of my solution is, okay, well, how do you fix it? education. And I come to a lot of the same policy prescriptions that you've just alluded to.

I like choice in education, not as an end, but as a means to an end, which is it creates the space for people to try to do things better. And that space is necessary if you want to do things better. So I like the space, right? And so I'll advocate for the government to get off our backs so that we can try to do things right, so that we can, in our own little sphere of influence, try to sort of stem the tide of what's been happening to the formation of our citizens. That is a root when you think about it. Like I just, once again, a strategy or not, I don't know if they should just come in tomorrow and do it, Bruce, you know, like, just done.

We're out. And you can go wherever you want. I assume in today's society, it takes a few more steps because if I've watched anything of society, at times, they need to be led by a carrot, right? They just, they got to, you know. And when you look at this, you go, okay, we're just going to sign a piece of paper. that says now instead of it taking a two year or four year or whatever your degree is to become a teacher at the classical academy now you can go out and hire a professor oh and all of a sudden

that opens up oh you got problems with funding interesting well what's the problems of funding oh that that seems like a relatively easy fix bruce you're laughing at me but i look at that and i just go if i'm sitting as the alberta government i just had this huge thing 51 000 teachers we're giving them every like i don't even know now i'm like i'm looking at this. I'm going 12% raise over four years, okay, up to 17%. 3,000 new teachers, 1,500 educational sisters, 2.6 billion in total new funding. The funding for schools went from 5.3 billion in 2015 and stayed relatively stagnant for four years under the NDP. And since then, is going to be over $10 billion. We have a problem.

Houston, we have a problem. Yeah. And that, you know, that line about adding 3,000 new teachers is a great opportunity to change the way that we handle teacher certification. All reasonable, but one of the difficulties for my money is this, that the crisis in competence that Kaylin refers to, which is very real, and the crisis in ideological capture that has happened to our institutions, including our education or institutions over a lump period of time, All of that has happened incrementally over a long period of time. I do not think that it can be reversed incrementally.

It has to be done cold, tricky, because you have to declare what it is that's happened and say, we're not doing this anymore. You can't continue to pretend to play the same game that the incrementalists have been playing for decades now, essentially, and get yourself out of this. You have to reframe the situation. And yeah, it's going to be difficult because people are not used to that.

But the proposition on the table is you can't fix this incrementally. If that's the case, then how do you do it in a cold turkey kind of way? You're feeding back the argument I just had with a buddy of mine on politics in Canada. I'm annoyed with Pierre Poliav because he says some right things. Yes. There's some times where I'm like, wow, that's great. There's other times I'm like, I don't, I don't need you to tell me what you're going to do when you're like 12 years down the road. It's like address the problems we got going on right now.

Right. And just give it blunt to the audience. Like it's a pretty stark situation we find ourselves in. And his argument was my argument just to you now. He's like, people can't handle that. Bruce, can people handle that? I don't know. I don't know.

But it's like, okay, so if the dad is going down. Yeah. It's just going down incrementally. You don't want to tell the people that the boat is sinking. Just tell them to move up to a higher deck and don't tell them why. I mean, no, get to the lifeboats because the thing is going down. If you got a way to fix this, then get on with it. And if you don't, well, then we'll just all piddle in the margins and let the thing go down.

To be clear, I'm not a piddler in the margins. No, I wasn't accusing you of that. Perimentally, I'm not a margin piddler. But I think, but my prescription, Bruce, would be, I mean, I think political power is, I just, it's not that I wish it was gone. It's just that I wish that it was wielded with a great deal more. Oh, okay, this is excellent because Kailan and I in this session have basically agreed about everything, pretty much. But here, here's the moment where we see what the difference is. I'm going to try to articulate the difference.

Okay. And Kaylin, you can obviously correct me if I get this wrong. So Kalin's complaint is that we have the wrong elite in power, that the wrong people have the power to make the wrong decisions, and we would be fixed if the right people had the same power to make correct decisions. My complaint is people shouldn't have the power to make these kinds of decisions, and that's the difference between us. Okay, Alan.

Look, this could turn into a very long conversation, and I don't think that we have time for that this afternoon. That is a not unreasonable characterization of the difference between Bruce and I. It's a little bit simplistic. Sure. You know, where I would sort of have a slight quibble maybe is, I don't want government to have excessive power over our lives either. I'm sympathetic to certain of the libertarian,

impulses that Bruce espouses. But I think that the way to achieve a greater state of liberty isn't to sort of try to eliminate moral guardrails or positive law or the state's involvement in our lives wholesale. I think it depends on cultivating a virtuous citizenry who are actually qualified for the exercise and preservation of liberty.

So I think we also are like-minded to a certain degree in our love of liberty and our dislike of onerous government intervention in our lives. But we also have different routes to, by which we would try to achieve that. Yeah, well, that's why I enjoy talking with each one of you so much. It's you're very thoughtful of the approach you're taking. And they both hold or carry water, in my opinion. I just go back and now, you know, I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about this blunt thing if I bring it back to the teachers for us. It would be pretty blunt, Bruce, to sign a couple pieces of paper that say the funding is going to follow the kid and we're going to take the shackles off charter schools to get funding.

Something like that. That would be pretty blunt. And I would assume over the course of five years, which in the history of the world is less than a blink of an eye, you would see a huge change in the education of kids K to 12. almost overnight. Now, it would take five years or maybe longer, but people are funny. Where's your kid going to school? Actually, I'll change it. Hockey. Where's your kid playing hockey this year? Why is playing here? Why'd he go there? All these things. And then all of a sudden, next year you see a few more leave. Then a few more leave. And if you were to sign a couple pieces of paper, that would be a relatively blunt way of doing it as the Alberta government.

That would open up an opportunity for families to take their kids elsewhere. And if I'm not mistaken, Kaelan, please explain this to me if I'm wrong on charter. schools. The cost of the family to come to a charter school is zero. Is it not? Yeah, so we have no tuition. No tuition. Like other public schools, students may pay nominal fees for school supplies, extra curricular, things like that, but there's no tuition. Right. So to be clear, I mean, I think charter schools are way better than standard public schools. I mean, there's no no contest there, but there's still a problem with charter schools, which is that they are still paid for by the state. They're still paid for by taxpayer money, they're still controlled and supervised by the government. So if you really wanted

to do the kind of change we're talking about, you wouldn't have charter schools either. I have no objection to traveling down that road because that's a much better road than the one we're on. So Bruce is everything. So in your scenario, everything is private. It's at market rates. Presumably you also have active, voluntary, philanthropic organizations, right, that sort of provide scholarships that fund students who are disadvantaged. That's the scenario, but it's a totally open private market. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a market and everything else. And, and, and you will, this is, this is the only

alternative to having some, you're going to be able to send their kids to school. They're going to be able to. It's, it's, it's, it's a having somebody in an office decide things for you. But there are only those two choices. And so the alternative to say, well, but we have to ensure, you know, equal access and the same treatment and these standards, well, what you're doing there is appealing to the authority of somebody to decide those things. Yeah. Well, and look, I'll argue your side of this a little bit in the sense that I think

one of the reasons why the scenario that I just proposed, which you've, I think, agreed to, would be shocking to many people is because it would offend their sense of justice that students with fewer means, but maybe equal ability, don't have access to high quality education. Sure. I mean, in arguing your side of this, I will say that is the current, that is the status quo right now. The Calgary Board of Education, for example, or any large school board is highly segregated by socioeconomic bracket. And if you look at, you know, the Fraser Institute creates a great visual map of school rankings in several different provinces. If you look at the map of Calgary, the areas that are more socioeconomically depressed, which have more newer Canadians and immigrants, they're full of failing schools.

There's basically no good schools in an entire quadrant of the city. The good schools are concentrated in wealthy areas. It's already extremely segregated in that way, but you would expect to see a great deal more segregation under the system that you're proposing. So how would you answer the people whose sense of justice is offended by this? Your life is your life. That's just too bad. I'm sorry, that's a blunt answer. But it's no coincidence that this pattern that you're describing, which is absolutely correct,

it's the same kind of pattern in a different way that you see in this single payer healthcare system. The whole premise of the healthcare system is, well, everybody has to have equal access. we cannot allow anybody to be able to buy their own health care. Well, but they do. They go down to the states, the people who are able get much better care by using their own money to go down to the U.S. Right? You're not preventing, you're not preventing differentiated treatment.

You're just making it very difficult for everybody to get good care because it's run by a bureaucracy that doesn't provide resources. Right. So we would all be better off. My case would be, we would all be better off with a private health care system in the same way we'd be better off with a private publication, a private education system because the market always provides what the market needs, what the market will buy.

And so on and so forth. You can think of all the institutions down the line. If I go to hockey right now, I love, you know, you both know me. I love my sports, right? And hockey is that way already. It's become this sport where if you have lots of money, your kid doesn't play in the local minor hockey. you send them off to an academy at a crazy young age now, I might add, and you're paying tens of thousands of dollars for it.

And it's like, well, can anybody afford that? Well, no. And do you need to do that? I have no idea. My kids definitely aren't old enough to know the answer to that. But you're seeing the private industry and hockey change the sport in general. So if you go to a model of everything being private, you are going to have the higher echelon where people are willing to pay $80,000 or whatever it is

to have Bruce Party be the lead guy teaching your kid, whereas, you know, it might be more like 100 bucks to be in the school with Sean Newman. But in fairness, you know, like maybe, maybe that's okay. But let's just acknowledge that the alternative, the public alternative we're talking about. That public alternative, and we don't even notice this because we're so used to it,

but the public alternative to these things is to require other people to pay, for your child education. That's what we're talking about. When we say, well, it's not equitable, you know, for some people because they can't afford, their parents can't afford to send. Like what you're saying is those taxpayers,

some of whom have no children and have no interest in this. They do have an interest in it. Ah, yeah, I know. This is the crux of the issue here. There is a public interest benefit in having an educated citizenry who are not engaged. criminal activity.

Boy, here we go. We can contribute positively to your society. You know, do I need to recite John Dunn to you? No man is an island, Bruce. We have a compelling interest in the formation of our fellow citizens. But you're pursuing that compelling interest with force. In other words, you are requiring people to pay taxes to fulfill what you perceive is their interest in the public good.

Okay. But the bottom line is they are being compelled against their will to do what you want them to do, which they don't want to do. So the bottom line is they're not being compelled to do what I want to do. They're being compelled to support what people who are not really qualified to make determinations about the public interest decide as in the public interest. But then it's everybody. Again, this goes back to how you characterize the difference between us. I think there is a real public interest in education, maybe even in public education. But the people who do things like setting our curriculum, setting teacher standards, deciding how teachers should be certified,

what people should be brought into the profession, all of these decisions, I think they lack the philosophical and intellectual formation to actually make good judgments about what constitutes the public interest. So we end up with bad curricula, bad teacher training programs, bad teacher quality assurance programs, right?

So again, I think, I think it's that we haven't defined the parameters in a way that is coherent. And we get this sort of mess where we're producing curricula that teach people to hate their own civilization. That's certainly not in the public interest. I don't disagree. I don't disagree. But if your proposition is correct, then all we're all what's on the table is to take those particular people out who are making the bad policy and put other people in with the power to make same kinds of policy, which is better content. That to me is not a change, right? I'll be a little bit, just because we're winding down on time here, I'll start to say the provocative things.

Can I just say, why did I wait so long to put you two together? Carry on, Kaelin. Well, you know, I just said, I said I think there might be a public interest benefit in public education. Public education, of course, is a relatively, you know, in history's scale, relatively recent invention. You know, it's largely a product of kind of American, you know, kind of upper northeast American New Englandish sensibilities. And it's, and it was an attempt to democratize an institution that historically has been extremely aristocratic, right? liberal education is an education for the leisured classes. And so I think American education reformers were confronted with this question of how do we make this good available to people who don't belong to the leisured classes, i.e. not to the aristocracy. And so we end up with public education as a universal sort of right entitlement expectation.

I think there's something to be said. And Bruce, I wonder if we should actually hash this out in some form. of whether the era of public, of universal public education needs to come to an end. And one of the main things that makes me think that is AI. All right. AI is just, it's insofar as it's basically being, you know, it's kind of primary application to date of large language models is to allow students to cheat on homework. Right.

What is the point? Right. If, if basically you have huge portions of students self-selecting and saying, I actually have no interest in my intellectual development. We're normalizing lying as part of this process. What is the purpose then? I think that could be a very interesting conversation to have. Well, why don't we just schedule it, folks, and we'll do it again.

We won't put a time constraint so you can say provocative things at any point in time, knowing that there's no clock on it. I'd be happy to have that discussion on here. Bruce, any final thoughts before we end today. Okay, so I'll just lob. I'll just lob a big one. There is no such thing as the common good. Because good is not common to everybody.

Every public policy, every public policy has winners and losers. Every policy you make is going to be to the detriment of somebody and the benefit of somebody else. And that's the thing you do not want your public official. to be doing. You want to be able to pursue your own interest by yourself. And if that means that you want to support people, you know, children getting education and you have money, then you should do that. And if you don't, then you shouldn't have to. In other words, your property is supposed to be your business. But we've reached the state. What if your property is 400 images of child pornography? Oh, no. That's that's, that's, that's, that's,

That's not what I'm talking about. I mean. Of course it's not. Just like you don't really support consensual cannibalism. I don't support it, but I don't think you should be able to restrict it. People's heads are going, what is happening here in the last two minutes of this conversation? Let's just fill people in. Bruce and I have a history.

So Kayla and I have history. We debated, basically we held a debate. between the conservative and libertary or classical liberal. There is a common good, right? I took the position that there is in fact a common good, that it's incumbent on policy makers, on lawmakers to have, to be able to sort of clearly articulate it to enact policy in a coherent way flowing from an understanding of the common good.

Bruce thinks this way lies sort of peril and danger and power itself is the problem. That's fair. Well, folks, you've gotten an hour of these two together. Appreciate you hopping on. I go, let's continue this conversation because now I'm kind of curious about where you left it, not the cannibalism part, sorry, or the pornography part, because I'm like the common good. That right there, Bruce, I'm like, I don't know, I've got to pick your brain on that one because I'm like, I can see Kalin's head.

I'm going, I don't know about that one. In saying that, I'd be interested in facilitating that conversation if you're both willing. either way. Thank you for coming on the show and both being here. Always a pleasure. Pleasure, Sean. Nice to see you, Kevin.