When it comes to Alberta’s schools and classrooms, you don’t need a task force to know which way the wind blows.
That was part of Opposition Leader Naheed Nenshi’s message — minus the metaphor mangling — on Monday in his first-ever question period exchange on the floor of the Alberta legislature.
Nenshi rose to spar with the premier 16 months after the Alberta NDP first elected him leader.
“This government loves its task forces, but we don’t need a task force on this. We just need to understand what’s happening and listen to teachers,” said Nenshi, the member for NDP stronghold Edmonton-Strathcona.
Premier Danielle Smith said that a government task force to include teachers, trustees, superintendents, education assistants and others will identify oversized and overly complex classes. That will help the government devise “targeted solutions,” she said.
The approach is necessary because past spending on class sizes saw them go up rather than down, Smith said.
“We’re going to be systematic,” the premier continued. “We’re going to look at the 158 schools that are overpopulated, get down to the individual classroom, look at the individual classroom complexity, and we’re going to work with the school boards to assign the teachers and education assistants they need.”
Nenshi countered: “Teachers have been ringing the alarm bell about class size and complexity for years, yet this government did not include these conversations in any of their negotiations with teachers and, in fact, explicitly excluded them from their mediation offer.”
The exchange was part of a week dominated by education, with the government fast-tracking a bill forcing about 51,000 Alberta teachers back to work Wednesday under contract terms they overwhelmingly rejected before striking. The unprecedented move invoked the notwithstanding clause of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, preventing courts from striking down the bill as a charter violation.
About 750,000 students across the province had been without school since Oct. 6.
Although Nenshi, a former mayor of Calgary, was elected to lead the Alberta NDP in June 2024, the session opening with last Thursday’s throne speech marked his first time on the floor as an elected representative. The legislature is sitting for the first time since he won a seat in a byelection to fill the spot left open by Rachel Notley, the NDP’s last leader and a former premier.
The UCP government stopped requiring class size information from school boards and publishing it in 2019.
“Parents across this province are worried,” said Nenshi. “They’re worried that their kids aren’t getting the best public education in Canada, let alone in the world. They’re worried that with huge class sizes, an ideological curriculum, more complexity and unsafe schools, our kids are falling further and further behind. So rather than pretend that this is a new issue, we need to act.”
He mentioned the vision of a past premier who moderated a class Smith and Nenshi attended at the University of Calgary about two decades ago. “Why has the premier abandoned Peter Lougheed’s dream of Alberta having the best public education system in the world?”
Smith, the UCP member for Brooks-Medicine Hat, quipped in response: “We just announced this morning that we will be reporting on class sizes, so we have an area of agreement with the leader of the opposition on day one. That’s very promising.”
The premier added that through “a number of changes” funding on education has gone up 33 per cent since 2021-22. “That is more than inflation, more than student population growth, and we’re going to do a lot more with this new agreement that we’re going to have with the teachers.”
