Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

Alberta goes after more teachers

The enthusiasm with which the Alberta government is poaching on other provinces to recruit doctors, nurses and now teachers must be questioned. The province is now offering to automatically accept teacher credentials from other provinces to go with the higher-than-average salaries available here as a way of luring prospective teachers.

Surely we want Alberta to have the best possible health care and educational systems. We should also wish the same for other provinces . . . and other countries, even though we ourselves will not directly benefit from their successes.

What is morally questionable is the practice of improving our school and health systems by weakening the systems elsewhere. Learning Minister Lyle Oberg appeared to glory in this approach when he boasted at a recent teachers' convention, "In essence what we did was declare war on the other provinces." He said he has "no qualms" about hiring from other provinces which are experiencing teacher shortages as bad or worse than in Alberta.

What makes this approach even more questionable is Alberta's long history of under-funding higher education. We will not pay to train enough doctors, nurses, teachers and other professionals to meet our own needs. Rather we will only educate a limited number of professionals and then raid graduates of other universities and colleges whose education has been paid for by the taxpayers of those provinces.

A recent statistical summary published by the Confederation of Alberta Faculty Associations and Alberta Colleges and Institutes Faculties Association painted a grim picture of the funding of higher education in this province. The summary shows that provincial support for post-secondary education in Alberta decreased by 21 per cent between 1994 and 1997. Increases since then have been marginal, failing to make up for the large cutbacks.

Over the longer term, government support per post-secondary student fell from $12,478 in 1982 to $6,184 (constant dollars) in 1999. Tuition and other fees in Alberta are now the second highest in Canada. One result of that has been predictable: While the number of people in all income brackets attending post-secondary institutions has increased, low-income students now comprise a lower percentage of the overall student body than they did 15 years ago.

Moreover, students are getting less individual attention despite the higher tuition fees. Alberta's post-secondary class sizes are now among the highest in Canada. While post-secondary enrollment in Alberta increased by 20 per cent between 1986 and 1996, the number of full-time faculty decreased by 21 per cent.

This is a detailed way of pointing out that Alberta wants to have its cake and eat it too. We want the graduates of post-secondary institutions, we just don't want to pay for their education. Let their education be paid for by the people of Saskatchewan, or Ontario, or Newfoundland.

Nor, it seems, do we want to pay for a top-quality primary and secondary public school education. While starting salaries for teachers in Alberta are above the national average, so are the class sizes those teachers will have to face. In fact, Alberta has the highest ratio of pupils to teachers of any province. The average Alberta kindergarten class in 1999 had 21.8 students; the average Grade 6 class had 26.3 students.

If people from other provinces and other countries want to move here on their own volition then we should welcome those people. What is pernicious is the Alberta government's deliberate decision to raid the graduates of other province's universities at the same time it has been doing such a poor job of funding post-secondary institutions within its own boundaries.

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