Alberta has enjoyed relative peace on the labour front for the past several years, with no major service disruptions in education or health care taking place.
That may all be about to change with teachers on what is looking increasingly like a full-blown collision course with the Jason Kenney UCP government.
Whether large-scale disruptions impacting thousands and thousands of students in every Alberta community will end up taking place in 2020 remains to be seen.
What is known is that the stakes couldn’t be higher and the impacts of the disruption, should it come, could be very far reaching, even on the province’s economy.
For its part, the Alberta Teachers' Association, which represents thousands of teachers, says a recent arbitration panel’s decision that teacher salary grids should remain frozen is bad news.
“This decision will mean that in seven of the last eight years, teachers have received no overall improvement in their salaries,” said ATA president Jason Schilling. “The province has not been in a recession for eight years – teachers have already done their share.
“The stakes are going to be higher than ever (and) teachers are tired of having to pay for continuing failure of successive governments to adequately fund public education.”
On the other side, Minister of Finance Travis Toews says the arbitration panel decision to freeze the salary grids aligns with the “crucial need to fix Alberta’s spending problem and ensure the long-term sustainability of high quality services for Albertans.
“Correcting wages over time is a critical part of our government’s commitment to get our fiscal house in order. Fiscal restraint and discipline must continue as we enter into new collective bargaining negotiations in 2020.”
With those negotiations set to start in March, things are quickly coming to a head on the education labour front. Whether the currently deeply divided sides will reach an agreement remains anyone’s guess.
What is known is that the labour peace Alberta has enjoyed for the past several years may be about to be a thing of the past.
Dan Singleton is an editor with the Mountain View Albertan.
