Alberta teachers not going on strike yet, as government votes in favour of a lockout
The government claims it's offering teachers everything they want, but the ATA says the government hasn't changed its position on pay since members voted to strike in June.
Alberta Teacher’s Association (ATA) president Jason Schilling held a Friday news conference to say that despite the government’s refusal to budge in contract negotiations, teachers aren’t yet ready to exercise their overwhelming strike mandate.
Meanwhile, CTV News reports that the Teachers’ Employer Bargaining Association (TEBA), which negotiates with teachers on behalf of the province, has voted in support of a lockout, pending Alberta Labour Relations Board approval.
A statement from the Ministry of Treasury Board and Finance to CTV said the government only intends to impose a lockout “as a reactionary response, if it appears that union tactics could harm students and families.”
In June, ATA members, who work in the public, separate and francophone school systems, voted 95% in support of going on strike. They have until Oct. 7 to issue a 72-hour strike notice.
The decision to exercise the ATA’s strike mandate belongs to its provincial executive council, which could theoretically issue 72-hours notice this weekend.
But this appears unlikely. During his remarks at the Aug. 29 press conference, Schilling said, “as students begin attending classes across the province, they will once again be returning to a public education system that spends the least per student in Canada.”
In 2022, the most recent year for which Statistics Canada has data for education funding and student enrolment, Alberta spent $11,180 per student—the only province to spend less than $12,000 per student.
Asked during the Q&A to clarify whether students will be returning to class on Tuesday, Schilling said: “Yep, they will.”
The government tried to get ahead of Schilling’s news conference on Thursday evening, with a joint statement from Finance Minister Nate Horner and Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides, which claimed that the teachers “have been offered what they asked for.”
Earlier this week, TEBA offered to hire 1,000 new teachers annually for three years at an estimated cost of $750 million, which the ministers said is “the exact request the teachers made in June.”
Not so, says Schilling.
The government has given TEBA such a “fiscally tight” bargaining mandate that it rejected every ATA proposal “to address class size and composition issues,” said the ATA president.
“The 3,000 teachers added over the next three years is a drop in the bucket of what we needed to see,” he added.
According to Horner and Nicolaides, TEBA offered the teachers a 12% wage increase over four years, as well as an undisclosed “additional increase that would further improve the salaries of 95 per cent of their members over the next four years.”
Schilling suggested the additional increase concerned changes to the pay grid. The ATA bargaining committee proposed “some adjustments,” which were “turned down by government.”
The teachers, the government claimed, “suggested that a contract with fewer teachers would save money and that funding could be funnelled into even higher salaries.”
Schilling said this is flatly untrue. “That was never tabled by the association,” he said.
In his opening comments, Schilling referenced “several new complex, sensitive tasks that require time training and emotional labor that teachers will see added to their plates this fall.”
Starting next week, parents have to explicitly opt in to their students learning sex ed.
Parental approval will also be required for children with gender dysphoria to change their pronouns and/or names if they’re under 16. If the child is 16 or 17, then schools still have to notify parents.
“Managing opt-in permission forms for sensitive content is new, and navigating new protocols around gender identity has caused anxiety amongst the membership,” said Schilling.
Additionally, Minister Nicolaides issued executive order #30/2025, requiring that schools identify and remove from their libraries books that contain “detailed and clear depiction of a sexual act,” and restrict access to those that contain “non-explicit sexual content,” by October.
It also requires school boards to compile a “publicly available listing of all school
library materials,” and for “a school authority staff member” to ensure that students aren’t reading contraband books “that they would not otherwise be permitted to access if in a school library.”
Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB) compiled a list of more than 200 books that it would have to remove or restrict under Nicolaides’s order, including titles by Margaret Atwood, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, Stephen King, George Orwell and Alice Walker.
Perhaps it was the inclusion of the two most famous books by right-wing pulp novelist Ayn Rand that set off alarm bells in the Premier’s Office.
Premier Danielle Smith accused the EPSB of “clearly doing a little vicious compliance over what the order is,” offering “to hold their hands through the process” to determine which books should be banned and which can remain.
“We are trying to take sexually explicit content out of elementary schools that is inappropriate for me to show on the television news at night, and so it is inappropriate for seven-year-olds to see,” she said at a Friday morning presser.
After downloading her government’s policy onto the school boards themselves, the premier is upset that they’re implementing it to the word of her own education minister’s directive.
In addition to dealing with these needless culture war impositions, ATA president Schilling noted that teachers are tasked with implementing new curriculum and standardized testing for K-3 students.
“The workload has increased, the expectations have grown. Class sizes continue to soar and the pay has barely moved,” he said.
It’s possible that the ATA executive is holding out on giving a strike notice to avoid blame for delaying the start of the school year. But the government is going to scapegoat them for any class disruptions regardless of timing.
So what is the ATA waiting for?
This piece has been updated to include news of TEBA’s vote in support of a lockout.