Letter: UCP government actions caused teachers strike

By Letter to the Editor on November 6, 2025.

Dear editor,

Three important problems directly leading to the teachers’ strike are exclusively of the UCP’s own making.

Firstly, they brag about attracting new people to Alberta but seem unable to comprehend that more new people means more new students.

Alberta spends the least amount of money on public education in Canada, per student, thus, every additional student exacerbates the funding shortfall. As the same sized pie is cut into more and more slices, the slices become smaller, even if you ignore the fact, by Canadian standards, the pie was too small to begin with.

Secondly, as reported in the News (Oct. 30, p. A7) for the last six years the UCP government has not required school boards to record information on class sizes, nor to publish that information (what doesn’t exist can not be published).

This means neither the public nor the government has an accurate measurement of demand on the system. There is a saying: if you do not measure it you can not manage it.

This self-satisfied ignorance of the UCP, beholden as it is to populists for whom facts are extraneous nuisances, means all that counts is keeping Take Back Alberta separatists happy.

Resultingly, as the underfunded public education system struggles more and more, the UCP can say it doesn’t work well and thus, justify private schools. This is called Convoy crony governance.

Thirdly, the UCP provides 70 per cent of what it gives to public schools to private-schools. Alberta’s last budget provided $461 million for funding private schools.

That $461 million is, effectively, double taxation on taxpayers who already fund our public education system through taxes.

Do you agree that we elect governments to try to solve problems and not to create problems? Look at how the UCP treats teachers and funds the education system, then ask yourself how that will help the province hire the 3,000 new teachers it claims it will hire.

UCP delusion, or, at best, their ignorance and lack of imagination, can never amount to a plan, nor to a solution.

Yours truly,

Gregory R. Côté

Irvine

16
-15