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.

[GordonBlue]

Patients may be offered a taxi rather than an ambulance in Edmonton and Calgary: EHS

https://www.ctvnews.ca/edmonton/arti...d-calgary-ehs/

A news release from Emergency Health Services-Alberta (EHS) says starting Thursday, low-acuity callers in who are advised by a registered nurse at Health Link 811 to see a doctor within 24 hours may be offered a taxi service to the nearest hospital emergency department or urgent care centre if they do not have another way to get there.

Cab rides will be arranged by Health Link for eligible patients who can safely walk on their own, do not require assessment by paramedics and are over the age of 18. Return transportation will be the patient’s responsibility.

EHS said more than one-third of the 50,000 911 directed to Health Link were sent back to 911 for non-emergency ambulance transport in 2023.

[GGG]

Honestly when Alberta led the market 10 years, new teachers were having difficulty getting contracts without leaving the city, moral was much higher, classrooms were smaller teachers probably were overpaid relative to the rest of Canada.

The question around wages shouldn’t be comparison to other industry. They should be looking at retention rates, average experience of hires provincial migration of teachers and other metrics over years to evaluate if teachers are being paid a wage that attracts them to the province and keeps them in the job. It does not matter if they have had pay cuts over the last 10 years. That shouldn’t have a bearing on today’s wage. It doesn’t matter what others professionals earn. This is supply and demand in terms of anecdotes and the limited data we can find teaching in Alberta is becoming less desirable. That shouldn’t be fixed with wages and class conditions.

[Point Blank]

3000 teachers over 3 years on top of attrition is not a reasonable amount when there’s over 1500 public schools in Alberta, and public schools are currently increasing in enrollment by about 15,000 students per year. This is not a commitment that requires the UCP to do anything different; all governments usually increase funding to meeting increasing enrollment without it written into the CBA, and even this number is insufficient.

UCP throws that number around because they know it looks like a large number on paper. Funding per student is a much better metric to look at.

For example, if AB funds public schools to the national average, Bowness High School would be hiring 25 teachers right now. Instead they are offered a pittance of ~2 teachers over the next 3 years.

It’s been posted here before but do check out http://abteach.cc/studentfundingcalculator

[MrButtons]

I am starting to get seriously annoyed about the Alberta government ads about the deal they offered the teacher. Trying to sway public opinion against teachers is just such bad faith negotiation. This government is really, really, REALLY starting to piss me off y'all.

[indes]

I just want Alberta to have the highest $$/student (or Can avg + 5% or something) with an allocation that is agreed upon by the education ministry/3rd party/ATA/Schoolboards.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by MrButtons

I am starting to get seriously annoyed about the Alberta government ads about the deal they offered the teacher. Trying to sway public opinion against teachers is just such bad faith negotiation. This government is really, really, REALLY starting to piss me off y'all.

Lying is how they got elected, why would they stop now? It works so well on the simple minded UCP voter. They can only carry one thought in their head, so why not make it a UCP lie?

[Looch City]

You would think a province which relies so much on the smarts of scientists and engineers to innovate and operate the oil and gas sector would maybe, MAYBE, be willing to spend more on the education of the future children that will be at the helm.

It's all so incredibly backwards.

How did we get here.

[surferguy]

We got here because people are too damn afraid of a marginal rise in taxes which would have still been the lowest in Canada. So now we have an ideological first government bent on making life more expensive in the province, that actively chases off new industry investment while shoveling money into a furnace.

[GioforPM]

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.

Citation needed.

Every engineer I ever met in university was no genius. Engineering failure rate is high (though lower than computer science, agriculture or advertising) but I suspect it's because it's a program that attracts people whose parents think it leads to a job versus being suited for that degree.

First year engineers have a lot less responsibility than first year teachers.

[PaperBagger'14]

Originally Posted by GioforPM

Citation needed.

Every engineer I ever met in university was no genius. Engineering failure rate is high (though lower than computer science, agriculture or advertising) but I suspect it's because it's a program that attracts people whose parents think it leads to a job versus being suited for that degree.

First year engineers have a lot less responsibility than first year teachers.

Agreed, it’s not an easy program by any stretch however I’ve known a bunch of electrical engineers who took the “square peg round hole” approach and passed the program out of sheer stubbornness. Hard work and a modest amount of brains / talent can get you through it. I’ve met exactly one other engineer in my time who I’d call a genius, and quite a few who I’d call idiots.

One of my favourite engineer stories was during a training day on a specific piece of test equipment we had a guy from the US doing a demo and explaining operating procedures. At one point the presenter said “we normalize our test values to 70 degrees ambient”.

A P Eng then asked “is that in Celsius or Fahrenheit?”. Well s*** for brains, if it’s 70 Celsius ambient in your room it probably means it’s on fire.

[Mr.Coffee]

Originally Posted by GullFoss

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.

Every Albertan Canadian should be HUGELY supportive of pipelines. It’s a direct input to quality of life for future generations and the money generated will be used for public good (health care, education, etc.) for generations. It’s very unfortunate how political it’s become, and that’s on everyone, not just one or two leaders or one or two parties.

I think industry and the government/ media writ large have done an absolutely horrendous job in being honest about how critical the infrastructure could be for all Canadians. I do understand BCs reluctance as they bear the largest risk, but the risk is so overblown it’s crazy and I personally think reasonable people should be able to strike a deal.

[Parallex]

Originally Posted by MrButtons

I am starting to get seriously annoyed about the Alberta government ads about the deal they offered the teacher. Trying to sway public opinion against teachers is just such bad faith negotiation. This government is really, really, REALLY starting to piss me off y'all.

Anecdotally they're starting waaaaay behind. Every parent I've talked when I pick up my kid at school or drop them off for a birthday party or playdate... they all support the teachers. Not sure about the parents for my older kid, don't talk to them as much, but all her friends that hang out at our home all support the teachers.

If this drags on I think it will be very very bad for them. When she announced the $30 for kids under 12 the response wasn't "oh that's good!" it was "why the F@#k aren't they just giving that money to the teachers instead?"

[Ironhorse]

Originally Posted by Parallex

When she announced the $30 for kids under 12 the response wasn't "oh that's good!" it was "why the F@#k aren't they just giving that money to the teachers instead?"

Because that money is coming out of the same pot they would otherwise pay teacher’s salaries with.

[Wolven]

Originally Posted by Looch City

You would think a province which relies so much on the smarts of scientists and engineers to innovate and operate the oil and gas sector would maybe, MAYBE, be willing to spend more on the education of the future children that will be at the helm.

It's all so incredibly backwards.

How did we get here.

I mean... if we were to ride the joke to competition, the answer is that the Oil and Gas sector know that Peak Oil is way sooner than they want the public to believe and their plan is to ride out the current generation of intelligence until the industry craters. No future investment is needed as that will just bleed $$ away from the profit bucket.

Also, "common sense" would tell us that when humanity passes peak oil demand and demand starts declining, the most expensive methods of extraction will be the ones to fail first under a contracting market.

At that point, if Alberta doesn't have a strong back up industry to fall back on, the whole province is going to become one of those ghost towns where everyone flees to other locales, the housing market crashes, and people, companies, and the whole province go bankrupt.

[The Fisher Account]

"There's just no money." - Only place in Canada without PST