Alberta Politics & Government Thread 3.0

[GGG]

Originally Posted by GullFoss

Right...and an engineering degree is probably the most difficult professional degrees to obtain, so a first year engineer getting 10%-15% more renumeration than a first year teacher doesn't seem unreasonable.

I'm not bemoaning teacher pay here or the profession. I'm saying the current pay for teaching looks entirely reasonable to me. So pay increases the evolve at inflation + 1% also look entirely reasonable when you consider how pay generally evolves in an economy.

The offer to hire 3,000 more teachers also looks reasonable. If someone said the right number for teacher hires was 5,000 instead of 3,000 and the teachers would accept that deal. I'd say "okay that seems reasonable too and its reasonably achievable."

I'm sitting here wondering what exactly the teachers would agree to that makes striking worth while. Because the province seems to have put forward a reasonable deal on the table and I haven't seen anything from the other side of what they're looking for beyond "student caps" which isn't seemingly achievable within a four year timeframe.

Why aren’t student caps feasible. Let’s do it like an escrow fund. Essentially you increase per student funding to support the required student caps and offer that windfall to teachers if the province and boards fail. It ensures the money is spent because the province is untrustworthy and it incentivizes the province and boards. You also add minimum capital spend requirements to support the new classrooms.

For the province to say it’s not feasible because they failed to build enough classes or schools is rewarding failure.

Especially when the reason we can’t evaluate if class sizes are getting worse is because the UCP has chosen not to measure.

How can you say the UCP offer of hiring teachers is reasonable when the people making the offer have done everything they can to ensure you can’t evaluate the number.

[GullFoss]

Originally Posted by GGG

This isn’t accurate companies attempted 5 - Line 3, TMX, Gateway, and Keystone. 1 got built, 3 got killed in regulatory due to PC and US issues, 1 canceled for economic reasons.

So I don’t think it’s accurate to say that no company would do it. It’s accurate to say no company would take on the regulatory risk given previous failures. If the goal of Carney is truly to fast track projects of national interest through the regulatory environment then a Pipeline project is actually a good one.

If you can get regulatory certainty these are viable projects.

Though I think that Smith should be trying to partner with Kinew looking at Churchill feasibility as part of this project.

Churchill probably isn't viable. The government of Alberta does have the cards to get a pipeline built, and get the industry to largely pay for it and they probably need a piplein to tidewater in order to improve pricing power (and therefore royalty dollars paid to the government), especially with what's going on in the US.

It's shocking to me that more albertans aren't on board with this given how important maximizing those royalty dollars are to our public finances. If you do the math of how important these oil sands royalties become to Alberta over the next 10 years...it's really something.

[GullFoss]

Originally Posted by GGG

Why aren’t student caps feasible. Let’s do it like an escrow fund. Essentially you increase per student funding to support the required student caps and offer that windfall to teachers if the province and boards fail. It ensures the money is spent because the province is untrustworthy and it incentivizes the province and boards. You also add minimum capital spend requirements to support the new classrooms.

For the province to say it’s not feasible because they failed to build enough classes or schools is rewarding failure.

Especially when the reason we can’t evaluate if class sizes are getting worse is because the UCP has chosen not to measure.

How can you say the UCP offer of hiring teachers is reasonable when the people making the offer have done everything they can to ensure you can’t evaluate the number.

I think it's realistically achievable if the province and teachers wanted a longer term deal. But I don't think the province would budge from the basic formula of inflation + 1% annually. And AB teachers wouldn't want a longer term deal, because it removes the option to re-benchmark pay over a very long time, which hurts AB teachers if other provinces increase teacher pay or private sector benchmarks exercises point to the need for higher teacher pay.

But maybe there's an option for an achievable interim cap over a four year term, with the understanding that final caps would be achieved over 8 years or something. But is there enough trust for teachers to agree to that?

[Wolven]

Originally Posted by GGG

Why aren’t student caps feasible. Let’s do it like an escrow fund. Essentially you increase per student funding to support the required student caps and offer that windfall to teachers if the province and boards fail. It ensures the money is spent because the province is untrustworthy and it incentivizes the province and boards. You also add minimum capital spend requirements to support the new classrooms.

For the province to say it’s not feasible because they failed to build enough classes or schools is rewarding failure.

Especially when the reason we can’t evaluate if class sizes are getting worse is because the UCP has chosen not to measure.

How can you say the UCP offer of hiring teachers is reasonable when the people making the offer have done everything they can to ensure you can’t evaluate the number.

Student caps are feasible, which is why they are implemented elsewhere. The problem is that everything that the UCP is doing is in bad faith and any argument against teachers (like the ones coming from Gullfoss) largely require ignoring critical data points to the larger situation at hand.

Like trying to compare teachers to engineers. It is absurd to use that as an argument and ignore the fact that teachers in Alberta have only gotten a 5.7% raise in the last 10 years while inflation and cost of living have gone up 33%.

The reason we are in this position is because the UCP are actively working against the teachers. The UCP are constantly undermining the public education system and doing everything in their power to spend money everywhere other than Education and Health Care because it allows them massive opportunities to grift and steal our money.

They stop reporting on class sizes so they can ignore them getting out of hand.
They ignore class complexity and erode supports by taking away EAs.
They roll out a horrible new curriculum and ignore the professionals whose actual job it is to develop the curriculum in Alberta.
They pretend they are going to build a bunch of schools but put no money in the budget to actually build public schools.
They gift money to charter schools and increase funding to private schools while paying the least amount of money per student to the public sector (and not budgeting public school builds that they promised).
They allow staffing shortages get out of control to the point where 5000 teachers are needed immediately and they best they can offer is 1000 unqualified teachers per year for the next 3 years (which will probably show up with the new schools that are not being budgeted - never).

The UCP refuses to negotiate on any of these issues and pretends that they are making an offer that includes everything the teachers want but that is a lie because the teachers have now had to reject the same deal twice. If your offer is not substantially changing from one offer to the next then that is not a negotiation.

Also consider the speed in which the UCP announced their stupid $30/day bribe to parents. They knew the teachers would ignore their garbage offer and were ready with advertising campaigns and bribes so that the mouth breathers of Alberta would think that the government is somehow right in this situation.

I think the UCP wants the strike and they want it to drag on a long time in hopes that it will break the teachers and force them to take a terrible deal.

The only way this ends positively for Alberta is if there is enough backlash from the people that the UCP caves in. Anything other than that is likely going to destroy the public education system as it will bleed even more teachers and supports and the UCP will force everyone who can afford it into private schools. Everyone else can have "worksheets".

[Torture]

Hiring teachers shouldn't even be part of the bargaining, it's the government's job to staff appropriately, not something for ATA to bargain.