Alberta teachers' strike: Numbers don’t lie

51,000 Alberta teachers in our public, catholic, and francophone schools launched the largest strike in the history of their profession in Alberta on October 6. This, after 90% of the teachers voted against the UCP government’s most recent contract proposal.

Tens of thousands of teachers and their supporters have been showing up at rallies across Alberta and around Sherwood Park because there is overwhelming support for the teachers’ position. Classroom conditions in Alberta are degrading the quality of publicly funded education and Alberta can do better.

I have had conversations with many UCP members since the start of the strike. They don’t even try to defend the government’s position because they don’t support it. Most tell me how much they value public education and how incredibly important teachers are to them. The best they can do is dig into the numbers to try and make some sense of things, but they can’t because the numbers don’t lie.

Alberta invests the lowest amount per student in publicly funded schools in Canada. The Fraser Institute’s Report, Education Spending in Public Schools in Canada, 2025 Edition confirms it. We are not just a little below the average of investment in education by Canadian provinces. We are over $2,200 per student below the Canadian average investment per student.

Smith and her Minister of Education have said the cupboard is bare and there is no more money to invest in education. But they found money to pay parents $30 per student per day while teachers are on strike. Teachers are not even asking for that much to improve learning conditions in our schools.

We are hearing directly from teachers, students and parents about classroom sizes, something the UCP government won’t talk about because in 2019 it stopped tracking class size. The numbers matter because it clearly impacts a teacher’s workload, and the quality of education students receive.

Here are just some of the examples I have heard about from parents and students;

• 56 students in an Airdrie Grade 5 class without any Educational Assistants (EAs). I can’t even imagine it.
• 47 students in a Grade 9 Spanish class. That is no bueno!
• 45 kids in an Edmonton Grade 6 Math class. That doesn’t add up.
• 42 students in a high school Science class. Students must sit 3 across at tables built for 2.
• 40 students in a high school Construction class. The shop space is designed to teach 26 students.
• 45 students in a Lethbridge high school Chemistry lab. Students work in groups of 4 or 5. Groups of 2 are recommended.
• 35 students in a St. Alberta Grade 8 class without an EA. 3 of the students are disabled with Individualized Program Plans.
• 34 Kindergarten students in one class with no EAs. Are you kidding me? A daycare would be investigated if it had a ratio of more than 10 four years old per adult.

The strike was entirely caused by the UCP government and their failure to properly fund public education and address classroom size and complexity.

It does not have an official end, but the Legislature returns for the fall session on October 23. As the Official Opposition, Alberta’s New Democrats will do everything we can in the Legislature to help improve the learning conditions in Alberta for our kids, which are the working conditions for our teachers. We can do better.