Has Danielle Smith ever had an original thought or is she just pulling everything she says out of the MAGA playbook?
Reopen the government Get back to work and we can negotiate to protect healthcare for millions of Americans you concerns. - - MAGA Mike Johnston Danielle Smith
It is very simple. If you don’t pay people enough or their working conditions aren’t good enough they won’t work for you. You may only think that the work is worth $X but if people won’t work for anything less than $Y then you’re going to have trouble getting people to work for you if you only pay $X.
The Alberta government could stop spending $30 billion on corporate welfare and instead spend that paying teachers what they are worth. Of course, ideologues like Smith don’t like high quality fact based public education because better educated people tend to be more liberal.
You’re framing this like its mostly a salary issue. Their pay is the lesser part of their complaints. They want a raise yes, but that’s not the bigger issue: its about the increasingly complex challenges in the classroom. Even if they got a big raise those complexities would still exist and THAT is what makes the job hard to do. And that’s the part that’s not an “simple” fix.
You said that they needed more teachers and more EAs. That takes money. Being paid a lot more makes you willing to deal with a lot more. The old, “They don’t pay me enough for this shit” refrain comes to mind. If they took the $30 billion they are handing out in corporate welfare and put it into education it would go a LONG way to solving the problem.
Where do you get this “30 billion in corporate welfare” figure from? Is that money that is taken from the provincial budget and given to corporations, or is that tax breaks? Big difference.
The Fraser Institute. That’s just direct handouts. That’s taking money that the citizens of Alberta paid into their government for things like healthcare and EDUCATION that are instead being given to for profit corporations. When you include tax breaks and other incentives it’s likely much higher.
Thanks for the link. I will definitely do a deeper dive.