Due to rampant mismanagement by an incompetent NDP government, Alberta is broke. Even so, the public sector unions feel they’re entitled to more. Why bother caring about their fellow Albertans!
Due to rampant mismanagement by an incompetent NDP government, Alberta is broke. Even so, the public sector unions feel they’re entitled to more. Why bother caring about their fellow Albertans!
Public sector unions are the biggest threat to freedom within our society. They do not have the best interests of the taxpayer in their minds.
It is an effective protection racket they have there though. “Nice health care system you have here. Shame if something were to happen to it. Too bad there isn’t another one you can go to, you MUST deal with us.”
Similar story in Ontario. Blackie’s loyal media is excited that all the teacher unions are preparing to go on strike this coming week, now that they are back from their “Holidays” in Cuba. Teacher unions and other unions are spending big bucks on newspaper and TV ads denouncing Hitler Doug Ford. But they are doing it for the kids. All this while the province is trying to recover from the massive deficits and debt the Liberal Party ran up.
The unions want the government to borrow money so they can get raises.
There is nothing stopping any union from borrowing money to give their members a raise. Pledge union dues as collateral.
Similarly there is nothing stopping the NDP from getting into the car insurance business – as a private provider. They can raise money from the NDP membership. They can thus provide low cost insurance. Remember the NDP say insurance companies make lots and lots of money. So NDP go for it: but with your members money.
Ontario teachers have over 10,000 members on the Sunshine List of government staff making over $100k. If you take a teacher’s average salary of $92,000 divided by the actual weeks they work they would gross $2,200 a week! In areas outside of the GTA a teacher would be one of the top earners in that town.
I am just stunned that these teachers greed is so evident when their product (students) are failing in math, English, science according to provincial tests that they of course want stopped. Universities have to offer remedial classes in these subjects to bring the incoming students up to minimum standards.
In my day, centuries ago, an Ontario Scholar with an average over 85% represented 6.4% of students. Now 62% of students are Ontario Scholars. Talk about mark creep!
People think I am talking “crazy talk” when I say that there will be very small public school system within 20 years. Parents are already making the tough decision to put their children into charter/private schools (which cost $ 1000/month per child) to ensure a quality education OR home-schooling. In 20 years, the only students in a public system will be the children of people who do not care.
As to nursing, I truly think it will be out-sourced to robots OR more general nurses not registered nurses. Think about all the changes which have occurred in the fast food service industry with self-serve kiosks, very few actual people “serving”. Of course the process of change was accelerated by the adoption of $ 15/hour minimum wage.
What really annoys me is the incurious way the media reports these strike actions (and, for that matter, all collective bargaining).
We are never, ever provided useful information on the only two questions we actually need answered:
1. How much do the strikers make now?
2. How much do they want?
Tell me that someone on strike makes $34,000 and wants a five percent raise, I might well think that’s a not unreasonable demand.
But tell me that someone on strike makes $90,000 and wants a five percent raise, I’ll have another opinion entirely.
Great Points JJM.
its always about the Children too dontcha know….
Disband the Sons of Bitches already.
Complete Outlawing of Public Service Unions that I would likve to see the day…….Priceless
Something that should become a Constitutional Amendmant # 3 of a Newly minted Republic. (1 & 2 from the US as well.)
#WEXIT
I read the news like some one living in 1930’s-1980’s Soviet Union.
( I’ve noticed my local backwater talk radio station running paid commercials from the loco skool district. Telling us taxpayers how great they are. ( 5 private schools have opened in the last 20 years.). Oddly the station doesn’t cover the school anymore. Huh.
If one examines marking rubrics that discount obvious spelling, grammatical and punctuation errors, as well as incoherent bits of regurgitation on the student’s part, and the fact that one can no longer fail students, I doubt that our graduation levels would be really that high.
You are being HAD….The Salary may be negotiated, but its the retirement benefits that are Insane… Abolishing Civil Service Pensions. or go bankrupt…..Government Money for Life is not sustainable….
according to another article, Newfoundland is on the brink of insolvency as a result of their government overspending, etc.
at some point, it might be wise to consider that path for any number of badly indebted provinces, since the restructuring will result in putting everything on the table. Unfortunately, that would also result in economic pain for a number of years as a result.
Since 1949…
Let it sink as it deserves to.
The rampant government mismanagement of Alberta began with the Progressive government of Ed Stelmach. It was he that caused the oil boom of Saskatchewan by chasing away invest through unstable and uncertain energy policy.
The mismanagement continued with the Progressive governments of Allison Redford and then Jim Prentice. High spending and high taxation and high deficit and high debt.
Rachel Notley was no worse than they. The people decided if they’re going to have a Progressive socialist government then elect one that actually calls themselves that.
Rachel Notley was no worse than Stelmach or Redford? Really?
The provincial debt when Notley took over was $11.9 billion.
Then Notley went on a spending spree.
Provincial debt as of 31 March 2019, shortly before the election, was $62.7 billion.
I didn’t care for Stelmach or Redford, but Notley was a disaster.
“I didn’t care for Stelmach or Redford, but Notley was a disaster.”
Yes. However it should be remembered that it was the Progressive Conservatives, of which Jason Kenney was the last Party Leader,
that allowed the Public Sector Unions to form in the first place and then pandered to them under Stelmach, Redford.
The PSUs just got tired of the “We’ll stop deficit spending and pay down the debt” talk from the PCs and decided to go with the more honest NDP who didn’t even pay lip service to it.
Seems to me as the public sector in Alberta wants the government to borrow money to make up any payment shortfalls for public employees. When you get to that point there is no turning back.
The Edmonton Urinal is an NDP propaganda rag. Janet French is it’s number one propagandist. She takes the NDP, AUPE and HSAA talking points and presents it as news.
I’ve threatened the Calgary Sun with cancelling my subscription if they keep printing her garbage. I subscribed to them for a reason and getting a de facto Edm Urinal instead is not acceptable.
You’ve threatened them? Really?
Shaking-in-their-boots time in the editorial offices, I betcha.
Just do it, for heavens sake, and let them know why.
Union leadership working to undermine a properly functioning economy is nothing new and stems from their adherence to the old Marxist playbook. Their ultimate goal is total economic collapse with the left in charge of building the New Jerusalem from the ashes of the old.
I’m not surprised at the attitude. Public sector workers have long felt themselves immune to economic realities.
I spent much of the 1980s either out of work or hanging on to an unstable and uncertain job. Then again, a lot of people were in a similar situation. Often, the ones who had the least sympathy for me were schoolteachers. Their attitude seemed to be that it was my fault for not going into an occupation which was immune from layoffs and recessions. They, on the other hand, had their union gravy train plus summers off.
No need for teachers or schools anymore for the most part. 70 to 80% of the kids can learn at home on their phone at their own pace. Teachers and schools are a relic from 1900s that belong with buggy whip makers. School is now a place where peers and teachers undo morals and character imparted by decent parents.
Wake me when Kenney lays off 25% of public sector employees.
Wage freeze? That’s not even rearranging the deck chairs.
Did Kenny even reduce the annual deficit by one penny? He should have spent the first 2 years beating the crap out of the deficit and the next 2 years in damage control. He was elected to fix things. Do it, dammit! Fire the economy on teacher’s tears.
Ward, a wage freeze and a mandatory pink slip for 25% of them. No wage increases until there is a budget surplus that would be at least 75% higher than the wages demanded.
There are a number if nurses in AB that are making over 200k. They game the system by phoning in sick, refusing shifts etc until the hospital is forced to pay overtime rates – then they are available for work. This situation is comes about as a result of their bargaining agreement.
Mike Pearson gave the federal civil service collective bargaining rights. This should never be allowed. Why should public employees have the power to withhold services? The bargain between the government and their employees was always perpetrated on the basis of job security and a fair wage. We’ve gone far beyond that position.
There are a number if nurses in AB that are making over 200k.
I think I know of what you’re referring to.
NE B. C. got a double whammy in recent years when the oil business was shut down by Red Rachel and Prinz Dummkopf and the forestry industry was put up on blocks by Andrewjohn Weaverhorgan. B. C. Assessment figures my house is now worth 7% less than it was a year ago. The result is that there’s not a lot of free money in the area, making it hard for me to settle my father’s estate.
Yet, I was able to sell of much of his assets to–wait for it!–schoolteachers coming up for retirement. I was surprised that some of them were peeling off $50 and $100 bills to pay for what they bought. Meanwhile, there are a lot of people in the area out of work.
Somebody, obviously, is doing quite well in the current economic circumstances.
A key driver for the Alberta NDP’s extravanganza was that spending the money tied the hands of their successors by creating large, deeply entitled, constituencies. The left always does this: spending like crazy when in power because conservatives, when the electorate puts them back in, then make themselves unpopular by trying to cut spending.
The MacKinnon Report illustrates the process: every recommendation “to save money” is actually a recommendation to commit political suicide – see winface dot com slash amt – that won’t, even if fully implemented, save a the taxpayer any nickels.
Yup.
When the Devine Conservatives were elected in Saskatchewan in the early 1980s, they promised to close down all the government-funded financial sinkholes. That included the company I was working for, which managed to stay afloat courtesy of bailouts from the Blakeney Dippers.
Then the government looked at the company’s books and saw that more than 200 people would have been put out of work if the doors were closed for good. The result was that Devine, et. al., kept that outfit going, though it was quietly put up for sale. Eventually, it was bought and became someone else’s problem.
rudy, conservatives, what phukking conservatives are you talking about????
civil servants represent the majority of the high debt the country ii carrying. civil servant wages should be frozen for a least 5 years, better still civil service should be reduced by 30% through attrition
I live in Alberta.
I have been calling for Legislation that would OUTLAW Public Service UNIONs.
They in my opinion, Evil and serve ZERO Purpose but to SCAM our tax dollars.
This bunch in Alberta is no different. They, as I commented in the Edm Journal, should consider themselves Lucky I’m not the Premier. Were that so, they would see an instant 10% Wage Redution across the Board…all the way up to Deputy Ministerial Posts – 15% Reduction in the entire Unionized workforce with particular attention to Alberta Health Care (One has to wonder why Alberta with the Youngest Population in Canada has the Highest health care costs..??). The levels of management in AHS is insane…I’ve seen the list – the SUNSHINE list, it would make yer head spin.
But what really needs to happen is a dissolution of Public Sevice Unions. They are, for all intents and purposes, LEGALIZED EXTORTION of the Tax payer.
As I siad in the begining – the Absolute ROOT of ALL Socialist – Leftist – Marxist EVIl in the Western Hemisphere. (just look at your kids cirricullum).
Unions, particularly public service unions, do allow you to be selfish, self-centered, greedy and entitled without having to own it.
Hard to find info, but I once guesstimated that there are roughly 4.5 million union members in Canada, with about 3.8 million of those being public service unions.
Seeing as union members are on the left and love Mummy Government, surely they can look forward to fair treatment sans union.
Save Canada!
Bring back value for money to Government! Now!
Abolish Public Service Unions! Now!
What do you even need a union for? You’re a nurse say RN, there’s standards that you have to adhere to, this pay scale and benefits. Don’t like it, go work somewhere else. One way to see the world. I don’t care what profession you are, folks don’t “owe” you a living.
Governed my life as a “professional” and my pay increased with the level of experience. Went to where the work was. Only time I was not “practicing” was when folks thought that money grew on trees and found out it doesn’t. I found some different work that paid the bills in the interim.
Professional Geologist 30 years. I fought more with my Professional Association than I ever did with the companies I worked contract for.
Governmental bureaucracy is nothing more (or less) than gold-plated “workfare” for the middle class to garner votes for the rulers. The Pareto principle applies in spades – 80% of useful work is done by only the 20% – most of them are seat-warmers – AKA muppets. Most civil servants don’t have a clue and couldn’t care less. It’s a monopoly after all.
Disgusting legalized robbery of taxpayers. They bitch about wage increases whilst already nearly double the average Canadian income providing nothing but developing world quality of “services”.
Choke on your +500K homes, 2 new cars, sunny winter vacations, and golden pensions – your not getting another raise this year!
They should have saved and invested the money. Jail them. These politicians have trashed it. The days of wine and roses are gone. These guys are greedy and stupid beyond belief. We need another Ralph. There is going to be a lot of pain coming down the pike.
We are doomed as a province. We are doomed as a nation.
Steakman and many of you with his sentiment are bang on!
Just so you know. It could be worse. You could live in New Brunswick.
The province where the bright lights of the provincial Liberal Party came up with an amazingly stupid idea to increase the standard of living!
With all the hilarity of giving your kids a raise in their allowance to better your family’s financial position, these Liberal Social Engineers decided to greatly increase the number of public servants.
And pay them considerably more than what the job required, or what the private sector was paying.
And they weren’t done!
In a masterstroke they realized they could also fix gender number and pay discrimination.
So they hired predominately women, exceedingly overpaid them( and not for the type of jobs keeping the lights on) and instituted an arbitration system that has allowed pay increases to exceed inflation by factors of 4, 5 and 10 and more over the years!
The quite predictable result is a bloated, overly expensive, ineffective yet entitled Public Service in a broke and getting broker Province(fully 50 % of the population makes less than $30,000 year, population 750,000, $20 Billion debt), with an ostensibly Conservative government that has delivered a reduction of front licence plates and requiring a car inspection every 2 years instead of one.
That’s it, beyond the traditional required giveaways to “Big Business”. Even sadder, they are in a minority and these are actual demands of the real Conservative Party, the People’s Alliance. Apparently conservatism is easily bought in the province with the highest HST in the country, that challenges Quebec for the highest income taxes in North America and charges double property taxation!
Even funnier, they just signed a long term power deal with Quebec.
Given history, one suspects that New Brunswick got royally rousted.
Luckily, New Brunswick’s owners(didn’t know you could own a Canadian province in this day and age did ya?) also own all the Media(and have the CBC scared to death) in New Brunswick and ensure that New Brunswickers always hear nothing but sunny days and sunny ways.
Come to New Brunswick and discover the plantations of 1850’s Alabama.
Government, and thus swivel servant unions, are analogous to heroin addicts, the least they need is the most they can get.
What about the TV ads promoting AUPE and ATA?
They’ve no competition, why do they need to bother us with their individual advertisements? What a waste of Union members’ money!
When the Alberta NDP assumed power, they inherited a province that spent 20% more per capita than any other province. The NDP are the property of unions and had to reward their members with more. BC, on the other hand, had a more fiscally constrained “Liberal” government with a balanced budget when the NDP came back and did what they always do.
Public sector unions are in conflict of interest in that they act through political action to be represented by both sides of the negotiating table thereby displacing those who should be representing the taxpayers. The only way that they should be allowed to exist is if their members relinquished their right to vote in elections that might affect them. Public sector employees now enjoy pay and benefits superior to the private sector despite being virtually immune from economic cycles affecting everyone else. One sector works for a living while the other significantly votes for their gains.
Well stated John C,therein lies the death of Canada.
The conflict of interest will not be resolved federally because the parasites now outnumber and thus outvote the productive.
As the kleptocracy runs out of other peoples money,reality might crash through the innumeracy that Canadians are so proud of.
But I doubt it,more likely is Zimbabwe Venezuela economics.
Western Canadians can still add,thus their irritation with spendthrift politicians,although we have been badly fooled by C.I.N.O Provincial politicians far too often.
The problem is the pool of tax payers money created by government theft,whenever such pools exist,fish will rise to swim in them..
The conflict between spenders of wealth and creators of that wealth has been the history of the rise and fall of civilizations.
We need to create a new republic in the west,just to provide a decent future for our children.
Never mind the additional wealth and freedoms,just the basic maths tells us Canada is fiscally doomed.
And the political stage shows that western Canadians are the idiots being set up to pay the bill.
If they only knew how well we could get along without them doing the work they consider to be so vital. To listen to some of ads the MGEU runs here in MB you would think they are all volunteers doing work for us out of the goodness of their big, altruistic hearts and that the general public has to be informed of this because we’re all a bunch of ungrateful assholes.
I’ve always looked at this issue from a purely supply/demand point of view. The vast majority of public sector workers (namely teachers, nurses, police & fire) have no demand for their services outside of government – in other words, they can’t work anywhere else for close to the same money. So why are we paying them these salaries? It’s like the government is competing against themselves. If you’re unhappy with your current job situation, you can either take what is being offered or quit & go work elsewhere, but this concept is lost when it comes to negotiating with PS unions. What I propose is to offer a 5% cut across the board, which would increase 2% (ie. 7% cut, then 9%) every week the offer isn’t accepted by the unions. Because we all are living way beyond our means, it won’t take long before the PS employees realize that the banks don’t care about their plight & will demand payment of their debts.
By the way, stopping at salaries is foolish – the real grift is the benefits, sick time, vacation allotment & pensions (DB needs to ne abolished & replaced by DC ASAP).
Time for some politician to grow some balls & hold fast on this issue.
Did any of these teachers study economics in university, specifically the law of supply and demand?
They claim it is very difficult to find a teaching job because of the surplus of teachers but then they demand more money.
If they can’t understand something as simple as the law of supply and demand why should we pay them more?
I think public sector unions should be offered exactly what they are asking for, with the provision that the overall salary envelope is fixed and non-negotiable. Make it clear that any pay increases will be financed with position abolition. Then let the unions tear themselves apart.
ATA President Jason Schilling said, “…teachers have done their part and we’re looking for some correction to that.”
I wonder if he understands what he said. Saying something should be corrected indicates you think it was wrong. Is it the position of the ATA that teachers were wrong to “do their part”? Nice to have it out in the open.
The ATA collective agreements are posted at “https://www.teachers.ab.ca/Public%20Education/CollectiveAgreements/Pages/CollectiveAgreements.aspx”.
From the agreement for Calgary School District No 19 (2016 – 2018):
3.2 Grid
3.2.1 Categories representing years of teacher education beyond Alberta Grade XII and steps representing years of teacher experience:
3.2.2 Minimum Years of post secondary education as evaluated by TQS and years of teacher experience:
Experience, columns for 4, 5, or 6 years of post secondary education
0 $59,054 $62,514 $66,475
1 $62,514 $65,982 $69,932
2 $65,982 $69,447 $73,400
3 $69,447 $72,900 $76,862
4 $72,900 $76,360 $80,319
5 $76,360 $79,831 $83,789
6 $79,831 $83,293 $87,250
7 $83,293 $86,754 $90,709
8 $86,754 $90,223 $94,170
9 $90,223 $93,681 $97,641
10 $93,912 $97,372 $101,331
Salary goes up to the next step on the grid with every year of teacher experience.
The wage increase being negotiated is how much all the grid values will increase. If there is no wage increase, the salaries will still go up with each year of experience. They are talking about how much to increase the increase.
I used to get bullied by grade school teacherrrrrrrrs for 2 reasons:
-I have a form of autism and thus did not ‘respond’ in the ‘correct’ manner (and spent countless hours bored out of my mind with the trivial nature of the curricula) and
-I wasnt one of the ‘cute ones’ aka teacherrrrrrrs pets who could do no wrong.
I posed the loaded Q to the local school ‘bored’: what do you tell the little darlings to do if it’s the teacherrrrr doing the bullying?
and then there is the somewhat recent article in the Globe about teacherrrrrrs being targeted with all the hate, violence and bullying THEY dished out for *generations* (but only to the shy homely looking ones in hand-me-down duds). tsk tsk tsk eh?
teacherrrrs are unapologetic, unrepentant BULLIES and now they are bullying EVERYONE.
And Kenney is going to give them everything they demand.