LETTER TO THE EDITOR:
Dear Editor;
The latest Tofield Mercury saw the newspaper publish a column from current Camrose MLA Jackie Lovely, where she is wanting to pat herself and her fellow UCP cohorts on their backs for silencing the teachers and sending them back to their schools via using the notwithstanding hammer. I simply cannot let her remarks slip by uncontested.
Does Lovely not wish to take her share of the credit for maneuvering Alberta to the absolute bottom when it comes to dollars spent per capita on student education in Canada. Did she have a hand in the UCP’s decision to stop tracking class sizes in Alberta a few years ago?
I take umbrage with Lovely’s suggestion that their ‘decision to use the notwithstanding clause wasn’t one that we took lightly’. Why then did the UCP stifle and limit debate in the Legislature on such an important Statute as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? Why did her Premier not stay for the debate or the vote on this very critical matter?
For the record the UCP did not bargain fairly or in good faith with the Alberta Teachers’ Association! Despite the fact that the teachers had accepted little by way of wage increases over the last 10 years with the promise of better times to come, the UCP set an arbitrary wage position and sat on it, with no intent of moving off of it. They did not negotiate! The UCP essentially forced the teachers to strike!
And further, in regards to the UCP’s alleged commitment to hire 3,000 additional teachers to address the class size and complexity issues that they are now somehow magically aware of, I suggest who in their right mind would want to come to work here in Alberta with the UCP’s disdain for Unions and workers in general. One of the first things that the UCP did when they came into power was eliminate the Department of Labour. That does not translate to respect for working people.
To be blunt I have absolutely no faith in the current government doing the right thing in education. Those are only words and ‘actions speak louder than words’. Look what the UCP have done to our health care system as they try to dismantle and privatize the system. I strongly suspect that that is part of the UCP’s agenda in dealing with education as well.
Thank you,
Gerry M. Footz
