Q&A: Premier Danielle Smith on why Alberta imposed a teachers’ contract

This fall, the Alberta government invoked the notwithstanding clause to force teachers back to work.

Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party government used the constitutional provision to override teachers’ charter rights to end an impasse with locked out teachers.

The historic strike began Oct. 6 when 51,000 educators walked out of public, Catholic, and francophone schools across Alberta over wages and working conditions, which cancelled classes for an estimated 750,000 students.

In a year-end interview, CBC News asked the premier about government decisions during the contract dispute and where she sees public education heading in Alberta.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

With the Back School Act, the government imposed a contract on teachers that they had already voted to reject. They’ve lost the right to collectively bargain. They returned to classrooms where they said the conditions were unchanged. Many teachers say they feel the government doesn’t respect them. So, how do you feel about teachers?

Because I was a school trustee for the Calgary Board of Education, I believe in local governance and local decision making. When we first came into office, we were hearing from our school trustees about where some pressure points were.

When we got a first negotiated settlement with teachers earlier in the year, the breakdown of those opposed was 60 per cent to 40 per cent in favour. And then we added an additional $300 million to the proposal, and then we got further apart.

We were wondering what was going on there. Part of it was, perhaps, there was more work that needed to be done on complexity, on aggression in classrooms.

That’s why we started our complexity task force. When we got the task force results back, we realized that there were certain decisions that you just couldn’t make at the bargaining table.

It’s going to require us to do what we’re doing now through the class size and complexity cabinet committee — a cross-ministry approach to address issues of mental health, addiction, aggression and behavioural issues.

And I hope that they’ll see that as we start working through these issues of class size and complexity that we’re serious about solving them.

Your government didn’t need to impose a four-year contract to get students back into classrooms, though. Why did you go that route?

We were very forthright about the amount of dollars that we had in our budget to put forward a package. It was $2.6 billion. And we’ve come to two negotiated agreements that were put to members. And then at the last minute, the teachers’ association put something on the table that would have cost an additional $2 billion. We just can’t do that.

And if we wanted to get certainty to get the kids back in school, we didn’t want to have 61 different strikes happening at the local level.

An arbitrator’s job would have been to bring the parties closer together. Was there concern that an arbitrator would have awarded a deal you weren’t willing to pay for?

We are very committed to making sure that we don’t have defined pupil-teacher ratios in collective agreements. 

And our school boards said, “don’t bind our hands.” Some schools want to have more teachers and others want to have more educational assistants. That’s the kind of flexibility that we need to have.

It was a fundamental difference of opinion on what management rights are. And I don’t know that binding arbitration would have taken that policy consideration into account. 

You’ve frequently pointed to complexity classrooms adopted in Saskatchewan as a possible solution. How do you envision them being deployed in Alberta?

English as a second language has just ballooned, especially in some of the larger school boards. Taking an approach where you have kids in an ESL classroom until such time that they develop enough language skills to be integrated is probably a pretty smart thing to do. 

We have also heard of instances where you have a child who’s throwing chairs and acting out, so they clear the entire classroom out. Maybe, what you need to do is take that child out and have some one-on-one time so that the classroom environment stays undisrupted for the other kids. 

If you want to take a student who’s causing a disruption out of a class, you need an adult — someone trained to do that. And this contract dispute has highlighted Alberta’s low level of per student funding compared to other provinces. How do you justify that?

We also have a lot more students who are in different types of learning models, such as charter schools, independent schools, and home schooling. Those enrolments have increased, and those are parents are willing to take on a portion of the funding, so it actually reduces the cost of education for government.

Some of the numbers don’t compare apples to apples. When we look at the teacher salary grid, when the contract is fully implemented, teachers will start at $70,000 per year and will go up to $119,000 per year. And that’s pretty comparable to what you see in Ontario and the west.

What we hear from Alberta teachers is that they are asked to do more for that salary. It takes longer to mark papers for a class of 38 than a class of 30. And the government has added more mandatory bureaucratic tasks. How do you respond to that assertion?

We could make it easier for teachers, there’s no doubt about that. And maybe one of the things we have to look at, like they’re doing in Ontario, is having each child graduate with trades education.

Maybe we need to integrate better with community colleges with the registered apprenticeship program so that it does take a bit of a load off the academic instruction.

Maybe there’s a need for us to look at different ways of delivering education. I’m very interested to see that there is some artificial intelligence (AI) assisted learning that helps individualize programs for each child. 

And we want to make sure that the job is manageable for teachers, that they wake up every day wanting to go to school and see the kids and they’re not feeling overwhelmed or frustrated or stressed.

There was public opinion polling during and after the strike suggesting the majority of Albertans thought teachers handled the dispute better than your government — and that included some people who identified as UCP voters. How much do you think the dispute with teachers hurt your future electoral chances?

I think people just wanted their kids back in class. There are some people who will say, “Give whatever it takes, just don’t have a strike.” But we have to be a responsible government. We have to make sure that we’re giving a fair wage settlement. We also have some people who said that we should keep the strike going on longer.

The proof will be in how we now address each of the issues that emerged over the last number of years, especially around complexity. I’m just glad that the Alberta Teachers’ Association has agreed to be at the table with us to help solve that problem, because I think it’s going to require all of the insights of those on the front lines to be able to do it.