The Western Standard has invited me to contribute as their “Token Lefty,” a term I embrace. They stand out for breaking the echo chamber by welcoming an outside voice, and I’m grateful for the opportunity. Thanks for reading, and if you have a question or comment, I’d love to hear from you. I’m duty-bound to defend Alberta’s teachers, or I get disinvited to Leftist Thanksgiving. No Tofurkey for me.Jokes aside, I’m serious about defending teachers, and my rationale, believe it or not, is the free market.Alberta has a teacher shortage, like several other provinces. The UCP has been trying to address this since 2023. Once Alberta’s teachers were the best paid in Canada. Now we’re still the richest province, but we fund public education the least..THOMSON: Canada’s silent war: Losing to terrorists without a fight.Any rational worker goes where the market rewards them. That’s supply and demand. By suppressing wages, the UCP is distorting the market and making Alberta uncompetitive.We risk losing our teachers to provinces where they can get a better deal. BC, for example, also has a shortage, and now they pay better than Alberta. In a bidding war for talent, we’re losing.This isn’t about politics, it’s about economics. An equation so simple we don’t need a math teacher to solve it. If we can’t do better than 12% over four years, teachers will leave. Their skills are in demand. It isn’t partisan to say the government has to do better, it’s just the reality of negotiation..Over the last decade, teachers have had a salary increase of less than six percent. With inflation, that’s a pay cut. And this comes at a time when teaching has become significantly harder, and fewer people are willing or able to do the job.Classrooms are tougher too: one in ten students speaks English as a second language, and the number of students with special needs in regular classes grew five percent between 2019 and 2024. That may not sound like much, but it works out to one more special needs student for every twenty kids. In just five years, that’s a big workload jump.Teachers are professionals, and like any commodity in a market, they’re hard to replace once you lose them. Yet Alberta doesn’t seem to believe in its own free-market gospel. And that isn’t the only conservative principle this government is abandoning..EDITORIAL: A pipeline to prosperity: Eby’s narrow vision stifles Canada’s potential.Conservatives claim to prize order and stability, but a province-wide teacher strike is the opposite: chaos of their own making.The UCP has manufactured this instability by lowballing teachers. The province is crying poverty, claiming it can’t afford what teachers are asking for, even after a surplus last year that came in $8 billion higher than projected. .Now they’ve managed to flip that into a $6.5 billion deficit that even the Fraser Institute attributes to “corporate welfare” and other bad decisions. Look, you don’t have to join me on the left side of the spectrum to see this for what it is: fiscal mismanagement. Teachers and kids shouldn’t have to bear the brunt of that..HORTON: The Combatting Hate Act: A dangerous step toward symbolic censorship.Even if you don’t like unions, even if you don’t have kids in school, teachers are a resource this province requires to function. We all benefit when our children are properly educated, and it’s nonsense to hand cash to stressed-out parents while starving classrooms.When Danielle Smith says this is about “good fiscal management?” That’s a bunch of Tofurkey. This isn’t conservatism, it’s budget vandalism, wasting more to win a pissing match than to simply pay professionals their due. Bridget Brown is a Calgary-based writer and small business owner. A former TV journalist, she is currently completing a master’s degree in neuroscience at King’s College London. Read her writing at imposterreview.substack.comCheck out her writing business at createthatcopy.com.Due to a high level of spam content being posted in our comment section below, all comments undergo manual approval by a staff member during regular business hours (Monday - Friday). Your patience is appreciated.
