2022, Austerity as Ideology: How Alberta’s UCP Engineered a MAGA-Style Assault on Public Education

“When a government shreds its own schools, it is not practicing efficiency, it is committing cultural amnesia. Civilizations do not collapse from barbarians at the gates but from bureaucrats with budget sheets.” - Camille Paglia

“A society that fears its teachers fears its own mind. The assault on education is always an assault on imagination, the one force that cannot be legislated or domesticated.” - Camille Paglia

“Ideological austerity is the new Puritanism: joyless, punitive, and obsessed with policing the very institutions that once produced the nation’s intellectual vitality.” - Camille Paglia

“Standardization is the death mask of culture. When classrooms become testing factories, the Dionysian spark of learning is extinguished, replaced by the cold machinery of political control.” - Camille Paglia

“Great universities are cathedrals of the secular age. To hollow them out is to vandalize the altar of reason, replacing inquiry with obedience and curiosity with sanctioned silence.” - Camille Paglia

The language of efficiency concealed a deeper deterioration of a historically publicly funded education that fosters intelligence, discipline, and cultural memory by 2022, when Alberta's educational system was caught up in an atmosphere of ideological austerity of the UCP. In order to establish a MAGA Alberta government power asserting itself over the teaching profession from K–12 and universities, the UCP government pushed through Bill 28, which froze public-sector wages for two years and overrode collective agreements. Despite the adjustments, educators correctly perceived this as a rollback disguised as austerity.

In 2021 and 2022, nearly a billion dollars was deliberately diverted from classrooms, causing 34,000 teachers to report that class sizes exceeding thirty students were becoming the norm, particularly in Alberta's urban areas. Canada was experiencing a massive influx of 1.2 million new Canadians in just two years, and the majority of these new Canadians were moving into western Canada due to affordable housing, public education, and job opportunities. In grades 3, 6, 9, and 12, the UCP government moved to performance-based teacher evaluations that were connected to standardized tests. The majority of educators started teaching to the standardized tests. When inflation and population growth were taken into consideration, even the alleged 1.7 percent increase in K–12 operating funds turned out to be a mirage. It was part of a larger trend in which public services grew by just 3.6 percent while real needs increased by 9.4 percent, leaving a $3.1 billion gap and classrooms bearing the brunt of the shock through staff fatigue, deteriorating schools, and shortages!

With 19 universities being hollowed out and the University of Alberta losing $52 million from its Campus Alberta Grant, the UCP targeted universities suffered a reduction of 18.8% since 2018, a 33 percent cumulative decrease! Additional cuts were made to universities in Calgary and Lethbridge. Scholarships, bursaries, and student grants cut to $111.5 million. The University of Alberta experienced 1000 layoffs, program collapses, and skyrocketing workloads. Tuition hikes of up to 33 percent were supported by UCP. Many Albertans and other Canadians viewed UCP targeting the arts and sciences with cuts were part of a UCP MAGA conservative ideology mandate to restrict free inquiry and a free intellectual space. Many questioned the UCP, were they updating and strengthening their Americanized MAGA ideology while continuing to cut public funding for education?

https://www.facebook.com/groups/albertansunitedtostoptheucp/posts/24941307225481464/

https://www.caut.ca/bulletin/commentary-alberta-is-showing-canada-how-to-destroy-education/

https://www.parklandinstitute.ca/retelling\_the\_story\_of\_the\_ucp\_governments\_budget

https://afl.org/kenney\_s\_ucp\_budget\_2022\_fact\_check/

https://universityaffairs.ca/features/the-political-battle-over-postsecondary-education-in-alberta/