Though it was messy, Alberta’s recently concluded teacher contract process did yield two positives. First, there’s a new four-year deal in place that most parties feel is acceptable. Second, Education Minister Jeff Johnson seems to have learned that the framework under which the deal was reached needs to be changed.
In case you missed it, the province and the Alberta Teachers Association (ATA) recently negotiated a new four-year deal that will see teacher salaries frozen for the first three years then subject to a two-per-cent increase in year four. Under a framework agreed to by the province and the ATA, the proposed deal required ratification from all 62 of the province’s school boards and all the ATA locals representing their respective teachers. That’s unanimous support from 124 entities. If ever there was a chance for failure, this was it.
In the end, there were three holdouts: the Calgary Board of Education, the ATA representing St. Albert public school teachers and the ATA local from Elk Island. These holdouts threatened to undo two years of negotiations. Seeing that he was backed into a corner, Johnson did the only thing he could: draft legislation that forced the deal upon everyone. That legislation passed on Wednesday.
Of course this sparked howls of protest, with some of the loudest coming from teachers and trustees within St. Albert’s public system, who stated it was a loss of local autonomy. Yes, Johnson broke the spirit of the framework to which he’d agreed in order to get the deal done. However, local public teachers demonstrated a willingness to reject the deal on principle even though they found the terms agreeable, so their claim of higher moral ground is rather thin.
Also, their cries for a return to local bargaining are baseless. Ever since school boards lost their ability to directly raise funds through taxation, the province has controlled the funding and has provided the same per-student funding throughout the province, so provincewide bargaining just makes sense.
What the whole situation clearly illustrates is that a new negotiation framework is required. Johnson has acknowledged that the bargaining structure is broken and indications are that a new system is in the works. Let’s hope that effort doesn’t get forgotten once the heat from this recent round of negotiations dies down.
When the last teacher deal was struck after much pain five years ago (the first time the province had negotiated with its teachers at a provincial level) the experience prompted a consultant hired by the Alberta School Boards Association to issue a report recommending serious changes before that deal elapsed. Obviously, that advice went unheeded.
This time around, let’s hope the province and the ATA can settle on a long-term framework that can be used for many subsequent negotiations, a framework by which approval from a sensible majority can ratify a deal, and a framework by which a subversive minority cannot disrupt the entire machinery with a single, strategically placed monkey wrench.
