2025 - UCP's Power Play Against Teachers and Unions
November 3, 2025โข478 words
The province itself served as the backdrop for a morality play about knowledge, power, and the enduring mistrust of educators in the late summer of 2025. In a dramatic and ruthlessly calculated move, the UCP planned a media frenzy in August and September that portrayed the Alberta Teachers' Association as a group of political operatives rather than a professional organization advocating for reasonable class sizes and fundamental assistance. The vote, which rejected the government's offer by a resounding 89.5 percent, showed how deeply educators felt insulted by this pre-strike vilification, which violated long-standing conventions of confidentiality in bargaining and transformed what should have been a sober negotiation into a public humiliation ritual.
The province continued to have the lowest per-student funding in Canada despite this drama. Additionally, as educators prepared for burnout, Bill 2 loomed large over all of the province's unions, frightening organizations like the Alberta Federation of Labour and leading the Canadian Labour Congress to warn that Alberta was turning into a test site for eroding workers' rights across the country. Teachers were on the front lines of this Americanized ultra conservative MEGA ideological austerity battle, not because they wanted to, but because they had to.
Even though public classrooms were overcrowded, with 84 percent of Albertans stating that class sizes were now intolerably crowded, private schools received a generous $461 million, five percent of total Kโ12 spending, and a 10 percent increase that outpaced the modest 4.5 percent increase for public schools. This was all while the government's budget priorities revealed a telling hierarchy of value. Sensing that resources were being quietly diverted from almost 750,000 students attending public schools, Albertans started planning a referendum campaign to stop public funding for private schools. Teachers in public classrooms were forced to implement a top-down 2025 cell phone ban, transforming them into hall monitors for digital contraband with classes of forty or more students, even as funding increased to private schools.
When the strike eventually broke out, the government responded with improvisation rather than reflection. It posted American-made educational resources on its official websites, which were culturally out of step with Alberta's curriculum and were perceived by many families as a temporary fix and a fragile stand-in for actual funding for public education. Public universities like the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary suffered from stagnant operating funds and rising costs, while private and charter colleges were given preference in the 2025 budget. This same prioritization was reflected in other post-secondary institutions. Research funding decreased and tuition increased.
Government-appointed curriculum panels excluded many educators and academics, pushing universities toward applied training at the expense of the liberal arts. What emerged, across Kโ12 and higher education was a landscape stripped of nuance, squeezed by austerity, and by the harsh policies of American MAGA ideology, pushed by UCP.
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