Jeffrey Park of the Alberta Parents Union (APU), formed in 2022, argues a teachers’ strike would devastate students—dropping test scores, increasing absenteeism, and widening achievement gaps—citing COVID-19 closures. The ATA initially rejected a mediated deal offering a 12.5% pay rise over four years but later demanded $750M for 3,000 new teachers plus wage hikes, contradicting their stance on strikes only over classroom conditions. The APU’s parent-funded push for school board election transparency and an "education continuity allowance" (funded by enrollment counts as of September 29) aims to counter union influence, while lawsuits target the province’s name and pronoun legislation. Park blames media misreporting on ATA bias, forcing Premier Danielle Smith to display banned "graphic materials" in press conferences. The episode underscores how parental advocacy clashes with union power, risking student outcomes in Alberta’s education policy battles. [Automatically generated summary]
School Board Politics Disrupt Classroom Culture00:14:56
Teachers in Alberta might be headed for a strike.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Despite the generous package, the ATA turned it down.
And now students and families are being held hostage to labor disputes they had no say in.
As Jeffrey Park from the Alberta Parents Union puts it, history and research show the impact of teacher strikes, and they're devastating.
Test scores drop, absenteeism rises, students pursue less education over their lifetimes, future earnings shrink, families take an immediate financial hit when forced to scramble for child care or miss work.
And we know COVID-19 closures proved just how damaging it is when schools shut their doors.
A strike could even be worse because there's no fallback, there's no online learning, it's just disruption.
Jeffrey makes the case for strike-proofing Alberta students through an education continuity allowance.
If a child school closes, the money should follow the student so the parent can choose a different school that remains open, tutoring, home education resources, online courses, or even vocational training opportunities.
And with school board elections so close on the horizon, parents also have a critical opportunity to push for accountability and ensure their local boards prioritize students over union politics.
Jeffrey Park lays out what's at stake and how Alberta families can fight back against being collateral damage in this latest union battle.
On this episode of The Gun Show, I'm sitting down with Jeffrey Park to talk about the storm brewing in Alberta classrooms, a looming teacher strike, the upcoming school board elections, and how parents can finally claim their rightful voice in the education system.
Here's our interview.
Joining me now is Jeff Park from the Alberta Parents Union.
Jeff, I'm familiar with your work, but I think some Rebel News viewers may not be.
Tell us a little bit about the Alberta Parents Union and how it came together.
Absolutely.
So we're a group of grassroots Alberta parents from all over the province came together during the COVID restrictions over frustrations with not being heard at the school level, the school board level, or even sometimes the provincial level.
And a lot of frustration from parents that it seemed like the Alberta Teachers Association was strongly advocating for teachers, or at least the ones that were active with the Alberta Teachers Association, making their voice heard loud and clear on education policy issues.
And parents were very frustrated about where's the parallel organization to make parents' voices heard.
Unfortunately, it wasn't coming from the Alberta School Councils Association, which is sort of the way voices were supposed to filter up from the local school councils to the government.
They were simply echoing the ATA talking points, regardless of what parents actually thought.
So that was, that was, we were born out of those sorts of frustrations, but we did a launch tour, 28 stops all over the province and heard plenty of other issues from parents that they wanted us to advocate on.
And we've been doing that ever since 2022.
You know, I think the work that you guys do is so important because the ATA, the Alberta Teachers Association, is this powerful behemoth that can take on the whole of government.
And the school boards, normally they're supposed to be reflective of the people who elect them and the communities in which they come from, but they are so often just parroting the ATA talking points.
And at no place in the system do parents and children and parents as the first best educators of their children really have a voice that advocates directly for them.
So I'm really happy with the work that you guys are doing.
Now I'm a parent with a child in the Alberta school system.
I had three, one still in high school.
And just about every day, I get an update from the school about a looming labor disruption.
And never in these emails do they ever explain what the labor disruption is all about.
You know, if you watch the news, it's all about class sizes and what's in the best interest of the kids.
But if that were the case, they probably would have had a strike vote over the summer when the kids wouldn't have been affected.
But that just is never the case, is it?
So why don't you tell us what the threatened labor disruption is all about?
Absolutely.
So you're right that that has been the rhetoric.
We can step back to June.
There was actually a mediated settlement on the table from a mediator that both the Alberta Teachers Association and the government agreed on.
And her suggestion was a 12.5% pay rise.
So 3% a year over four years, one of those retroactive.
And when you do the compounding interest there, that comes out to about 12.5%.
So a 12.5% pay rise.
And her solution that she recommended for class sizes was that they basically put together working groups, basically a committee at the school board level.
Since after all, it is the school board level where those frontline decisions about class sizes, how many teachers, how many education assistants, and those sorts of things are made.
And so that was her recommendation.
The government accepted that recommendation.
The Alberta Teachers Association executive narrowly accepted that recommendation, seven to six.
But when they took it back to their members, they rejected it.
And again, the rhetoric coming from the members, the rhetoric coming from the ATA executive was that they would never consider striking over wages.
They would only ever consider striking over classroom conditions.
And so the executive went to their membership and asked, okay, what can we offer as a counteroffer to try to settle this labor dispute?
And their members gave them a salary increase that they thought was appropriate.
We've never been told how much that was, but then on the classroom conditions side, what they asked for was 1,000 teachers a year over three years.
So 3,000 teachers.
That commitment alone would cost the government $750 million, plus the cost of the pay rises.
Plus, they were also throwing in some classroom complexity grants and that kind of thing.
And so multi-billion dollar Commitment overall.
And so the government actually called their bluff, you could say, and accepted their demand on classroom conditions.
They said they give the 3,000 teachers over three years.
But since we all agree this isn't over more of a pay rise than 12.5%, that's where we have to stop.
This is really all the room we have in the budget.
And the government has continued to insist that any further negotiation, we're really working from this is the budget.
We can't spend more than this.
And so they suggested the only way to afford more of a pay rise would be to have fewer teachers.
And the government alleges that at the bargaining table, the Alberta Teachers Association actually said, yes, we should do that.
Fewer teachers, more of a pay rise.
Now, when Jason Schilling, the president of the ATA, was asked about that, every time he's been asked about it, he has said that was not a formal offer placed on the table, which tells me they did say that.
They just didn't present it as a formal offer, right?
He was very careful in how he denied that.
So we've really had a reversal, in my opinion, not only of the rhetoric, which would be bad enough because you're already, you've told the public you're after one thing and you're clearly after another.
But to me, I think that's an abandonment of the mandate they had from their own membership.
That classroom conditions were what they were saying, why they were saying, they were saying, you know, a working group, essentially a committee, is not enough to deal with, you know, we already know what the problems are.
We just need to hire new teachers, right?
And so for them to have that demand granted by the government and still walk away from the table, I think is an abandonment of their members, not to mention Alberta parents and students.
It's just atrocious when you think of it, that they would use kids as their excuse to do these things.
And then when, you know, when they're told there's only so much, so you can take from one and give to the other, they say, yes, take from the kids and give it to us.
And if you don't, we're going to strike and hurt the kids.
Well, and they insist that a strike wouldn't hurt the kids.
Jason Schilling said that teachers are professionals.
They know how to deliver the information, make sure kids don't fall behind in the event of a labor disruption.
But again, all of us know that isn't true because we lived through the COVID restrictions and kids did fall behind.
And especially the most vulnerable kids fell behind.
The COVID shutdowns erased 20 years of progress, closing the gap between the highest achieving and the lowest achieving students.
20 years of progress down the drain in two years.
And so the bottom fell out, especially for the kids who need the most support.
So we already know that learning disruptions are that it, you know, I agree, teachers are professionals.
They're not miracle workers.
You can't teach in the conditions of a learning disruption.
You can't just catch the kids up as if there's some magic formula to do that.
If there was, then they shouldn't have complained when the new curriculum rolled out and they said, well, there's too much to cover in this new curriculum.
Wait a second, I thought you were professionals.
I thought we could just magically speed this up somehow.
Catch them up.
It's contradictory at multiple levels in their messaging.
But absolutely, we know for a fact that kids will be harmed if there's a labor disruption.
So it's a real abandonment of Albertans for them to have switched their position this way.
Now, I want to ask you about an opportunity for parents to sort of write the ship in some little way.
And that is in the upcoming school board elections.
I don't think people realize how easy it is to flip a school board if everybody gets real organized.
But, you know, I think as conservatives, and I think the Alberta Parents Union is largely nonpartisan, but as a conservative, we're always looking at the macro issue.
We're looking at Mark Carney spiraling us into out-of-control debt.
We look at the provincial government.
We're always wondering, you know, how are they going to take on Mark Carney?
And we forget about the things that are closer to home.
And when you think that, you know, politics is downstream of culture.
If we want to change politics, we need to change the culture, but we also have to protect the culture.
And if we don't have the right culture at the school board that honors and respects parents and children first, we're never going to fix all the other stuff.
But the good news is that's the thing I think where if we just get a little bit organized, we can really make a difference because not a lot of people vote in the school board election.
So tell us about what the Alberta Parents Union is up to in the school board elections.
Absolutely.
You're right that politics is downstream of culture, of course, but schools are a culture-making institution that unfortunately are run too much by politics.
And so we, you know, the old saying, you may not care about politics, but politics cares about you and politics cares about your kids.
And it's, and the school board is where the rubber meets the road in the same way that, you know, if you're if your garbage isn't getting picked up, no matter how much you might care more about who your MP is than your city councilor is, your city councilor is the one that matters to you when your garbage isn't getting picked up.
And when your kids are being threatened by a strike because school boards haven't done their job in terms of making sure that class sizes and classroom complexity are being addressed, or they haven't done their job in removing graphic sexual material from libraries, or they haven't done their job in banning cell phones from classrooms so that learning can occur, or all these various things where the school boards have simply failed to do their job.
And unfortunately, in too many cases, the province has been forced to step in.
Surveying School Board Candidates00:10:30
When the rubber meets the roads on those issues, it doesn't matter if you care more who your MP is or you care more about Mark Kearney.
The thing that will affect your day-to-day with your own kid are the people at the school board level.
And you're right that the turnout for school board is very poor.
And I think one of the reasons for that is if you're with the Alberta Teachers Association or CUPE or one of the labor union organizations, they'll tell you who to vote for, essentially.
And so there's easy information accessible If you're voting, if your values are aligned with the labor unions, and you and that's what you want to see from the education system, it's easy to find out who to vote for.
We don't want to tell people who to vote for, but we do want people to be able to more easily find out where their values are aligned, which trustees their values are aligned with.
So, what we're doing is we have way back in December, we started surveying our own parents, grandparents, and taxpayers that are involved with the Alberta Parents Union, asking them what questions they would like to ask a school board trustee candidate to find out if their values were aligned.
And we compiled the results of that survey.
And then, unfortunately, we had a chance to take a dry run at it because there was a death on the Calgary Catholic School Board and they already had one vacancy.
So, they were forced to have a by-election in January.
And so, we got to do a little bit of a dry run in January of this survey system.
And we were pleased to see that all but one of the candidates, including actually both of the ATA-aligned candidates, returned our survey.
And so, people had a lot of information to go off of.
And we were also pleased to see that from the feedback we got from our own folks that they were easily able to, our parents, grandparents, and taxpayers did a great job of selecting the questions so that people can easily tell which candidates align with their values from looking at the survey.
And then, we were also pleased to see that if you searched for Calgary Catholic School Board by-election, we were the third result on Google.
If you searched for the candidates' names, sometimes we were even the first or second result.
And so, for you know, there are basically three ways people decide if they're going to vote in the school board elections.
And again, way too many people don't.
There are basically three ways they decide.
They either are just going off the names they heard, and that's probably how most people decide.
They're just going off the names they heard.
They ask someone in some voluntary community they're in, usually a church or something like that.
They ask someone who knows, someone who's political, who knows.
I'm sure you've been that person in your church.
I've been that person in every church I've ever been to.
And so, so they just ask someone they know to help them sort out which candidates they should support.
Or they just Google all the names, usually on the day of on the day they're on the way to the polls.
And so, for that last group, so hopefully, hopefully, for that second group, they're receiving our emails.
You can go to albertaparentsunion.ca, sign up for our emails, make sure that you're getting them, and then you'll get the results of the survey in your inbox.
The whole front page is where you sign up.
We have had opponents of ours on the labor union side of things unable to figure that out, but it's right there, whole front page.
You can sign up.
I'm sure you can figure it out.
I see it right there: join, donate, volunteer.
Absolutely.
And so, you can sign up for our emails, make sure to get it.
So, hopefully, a large group of that second are hearing from people who were able to get that information from us to know which candidates are worthy of support.
But then, that whole third group who's Googling it on the way to the polls, basically, we're hoping, and we have strong reason to believe that our survey will be very high in the Google results for the candidates' names, for the name of the wards, for the name of the election, whatever.
And so, we really hope that we can sort of close that information gap and help more people to get involved.
You know, I think you will.
You know, you see other organizations do this, like Campaign Life Coalition, they send out their surveys of the MP candidates, and it helps you know where they land on the issue.
As you say, you're not telling people how to vote, you're just giving them the information to inform their vote, which I think is a valuable thing to do, especially on these issues.
You know, we can't wonder where all these cultural and educational problems are coming from if we aren't actively getting involved in the systems that so often create them.
I want to ask you about some of the other issues that the Alberta Parents Union touches on.
One of them was the, I'm going to use the language of the left here: the book ban, which absolutely was not a book ban.
It was a graphic materials prohibition in an elementary school library, which seems like a crazy thing to actually have to do, but I'm glad they did.
You folks were pretty outspoken on that.
I was surprised to see the amount of misinformation on it coming from the media who were also in the same media briefings, privy to the same embargo documents that I had.
And yet, they are the misinformation peddlers on this.
I'm going to ask you to speculate: why are they getting this stuff so wrong?
Well, at least part of it is because their classic move to get both sides of the story is to get the government side and the Alberta Teachers Association side, or get the government side and the Library Association of Alberta, I think is the correct order of those words, get their side.
And thankfully, we've more and more had even traditional media starting to realize that they also need to reach out for the parent side.
That's one of the reasons for the name Alberta Parents Union.
It makes it makes it a little easier for journalists to realize: okay, I've talked to the teachers.
Who should I talk to next?
And so, thankfully, we have been able to get our voices in there, even at places like the CBC and so forth.
And so, that's helpful.
But I think a large element of it is I think a lot of legacy media journalists are coming from the perspective that so the government is making a claim, and then the experts on whether that claim is true or not, or on how to evaluate that claim, are the Alberta Teachers Association or the Library Association of Alberta.
So, they're going to, frankly, the misinformation peddlers As the experts to respond to the government.
And I think that's where they can offer.
Well, and I think they're going to the people who brought these horrible materials into the libraries in the first place to say, so they're there.
Is this a bad thing?
And of course they say no because they're the ones who did it.
Right.
It's the most bizarre thing.
And I'm just so glad.
Although at the same time, I've never seen anything quite like it, where our premier has to stand at a podium and show the graphic materials that they uncovered in school libraries just because nobody will get the story straight.
And it happened at least on two separate occasions where they couldn't even broadcast the materials on the news to show people.
She had to give a trigger warning before she showed the materials in a press conference.
And thank goodness these press conferences are live streamed because I think a lot of delicate minds might not have even believed it if they hadn't been able to see it.
I saw a political cartoon trying to make fun of Danielle Smith showing her holding up a copy of Archie and Jughead and depicting her as being outraged by the contents of Archie and Jughead.
And I pointed out they can't show what she was actually outraged at because if they put that in their newspaper, people if they didn't if they didn't have some legal action against them for it, people would unsubscribe in mass numbers.
Content Too Graphic00:02:27
So one of the elements here is that the actual content that children were being exposed to in elementary libraries is too graphic to be shown on the news, too graphic to be really engaged with publicly.
You know, you can't post the pictures on social media and keep your social media account, right?
And so I think that's a large element of the problem.
And you hit it right on the head saying that these are the people who, you know, the traditional media is going to the people who brought these books in in the first place.
And I have to go back again to the discussions around curriculum.
These are the same people who said that six-year-olds learning about Charlemagne, the emperor of the Franks, or the Silk Road, or certain elements of Alberta history that we were, that that was age inappropriate was the exact word they used.
Age inappropriate to learn about Charlemagne, age inappropriate to learn about the Silk Road, not age inappropriate to get genderqueer or flame.
Right.
Right.
Homo erotic cartoons were age appropriate for six-year-olds, but learning about the settling of Alberta was a little bit too over the heads of six-year-olds.
A couple more things before I let you go.
And I know I only promised that I would take up 20 minutes of your time, but we're beyond that.
What are some of the other policies that, or issues, I guess I should say, that the Alberta Parents Union is engaged in?
Sure.
We so two Organizations have sued the government over the name and pronoun legislation that the province brought in last year.
September 29th Funding Deadline00:09:21
Well, I guess it just took effect on September 1st.
It came into force on September 1st, and promptly there was a lawsuit.
So we plan on being heavily involved in that and bringing parents' perspectives that so parents have a real interest in this court case as well.
Our interest is that we shouldn't have information withheld from us.
We shouldn't be lied to about what's happening with our kids at school on anything.
But gender and sexuality is no exception.
And so stay tuned.
We'll have more to say about that as things develop with that lawsuit.
That's definitely one of the things that we're working on.
We've got some grades seven through nine curriculum that's being advanced right now.
We will probably have more to say about that after the school board elections, to be frank, just because there's a lot to talk about right now.
And so we've sent out one email about that, but we'll probably have more to say and be looking for more input on that.
And well, and then in the event of a strike, I know a lot of parents are going to be scrambling for alternative arrangements.
There are some teachers who are going to be scrambling for alternative arrangements.
So we're already helping parents and teachers and talking them through what their options are to legally have alternate arrangements in the event of a work stoppage and a learning disruption with kids.
And I should say real quickly that for everyone to know that the ATA has promised a strike if they can't negotiate a settlement by October 6th.
But September 29th is the September count date.
And that is when the funding flows to all the education options on the basis of how many kids are in a seat in that education option on September 29th.
So if a strike on October 6th would make you want to do something different, you should do it before September 29th so that you know that the funding will be there.
Now, that's in the status quo.
We're also advocating for something we're calling an education continuity account for the money to follow the child for the duration of the strike so that parents are able to switch to home education and have some of those costs reimbursed.
Or if they can find a seat in a charter school, most charter schools don't have open seats.
They're already well oversubscribed.
But if they can find a seat in an independent school, some of those are oversubscribed, but not all of them.
Those are not ATA shops.
Well, there's one independent school that is unionized.
The rest of them are non-union.
The charter schools are all non-union.
Home education, obviously, you don't have to join the union to teach your own kids, parents.
And in Alberta, $910 of your home education expenses are reimbursable from the government if you choose to go that route and if you sign up under another school authority, what the government calls a supervising authority.
They just meet with you twice a year to make sure that everything's on track.
And then, sorry, not the government, the supervising authority.
So if you sign up to home educate through a private school, for instance, someone from that private school will come meet with you twice a year.
No, not a huge deal.
And then or if parents can find some online tutoring, well, some in-person tutoring or some online tutoring, or like now there's now there's AI bots that can teach your kid math, that can figure out where your kid is, where they're missing things, and you can keep those math skills up to date,
but they cost money.
Or if you find an internship opportunity that your kid can have so that they've got something to do to grow their mind and enrich themselves during a teacher strike.
We think the money should follow the child to any of those choices, anything that the parents find to make sure that their child's education continues in the event of a work stoppage.
And so we're advocating very strongly that the provincial government not just save all the money, which I can understand why that would be tempting, but you do that.
It's going to hurt a lot of kids, especially if there's a lengthy work stoppage.
So we're encouraging them to have the money follow the child to non-union education options of all kinds, including just reimbursing the parents themselves for their own costs of educating their kids during any work stoppage.
You know, it's, I think, an unintended consequence of the teachers' union that every time they do something like this, it drives people into the other options.
And I guess that's the like the silver lining in all of this, including the COVID lockdowns of the schools, was that parents realized that they have a lot of choices out there.
And those choices are getting more and more all the time.
Every time these teachers' unions try to use our kids to their benefit.
And I guess I'm just, I'm glad to see it.
And I'm glad that the Alberta Parents Union offers advice to help parents find those resources.
Now, how do people get involved in the Alberta Parents Union?
Because you are up against a behemoth of the ATA.
And you really are, I don't want to say you're a mom and pop shop, but I mean, they're massively well-funded with union dues, and you're just parent-led.
Right, that's right.
And we don't take any money involuntarily.
That's our, that's our, anyone, anyone who gives us money has to, you guys have the same value.
Anyone who gives us money has to be doing it of their own free will.
So we won't pay tax money.
And we can't force anyone to join our union like the teacher union can.
So We're fully funded by voluntary donations from parents and some grandparents.
And we have a membership option, which is just designed to, you know, because most folks sort of tune in to education policy at back to school time and when there's something bad happening, like a teacher strike or inappropriate books in the library or whatever.
But they don't have the bandwidth to pay attention to education policy all the time.
That's what we're here for, right?
We can pay attention all the time and let you know when there's something worth paying attention to.
And so we have a membership model so that we can know how much we can expect each month and we can plan ahead without being quite so subject to the cycle of attention that gets paid to education policy.
So folks can join, but even just signing up for our mailing list goes a long way just to make sure that you're informed and that you can, and we'll never charge for the information.
But just to make sure that you're informed and that you know, we're not going to tell you to call your MLA every month, but we will tell you that if you call your MLA this month, it might actually make a difference.
Nadine On Alberta Pensions00:04:29
And so we try to provide that as a service to busy parents to help them not have to do politics every time they're sitting at soccer practice or hockey practice and that they're able to fully engage in the life of their family and have us there to let them know when something big is going on.
Well, Jeff, I appreciate the work that you're doing on behalf of Alberta parents and kids so much.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation says that they engage an army of people who are involved in the issue.
And as I said before, you're really up against a well-funded machine that has the media on their side.
And even I learned something today about the negotiations ongoing with the ATA that I hadn't really seen reported in the mainstream media.
So, you know, I just think it's such a valuable resource.
And I think you should really be proud of the work that you're doing.
And I want to thank you for coming on the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
thank you for the kind words well the last portion of the show is always yours I sort of turn the show over to you and let you tell me what you think about the work that I do at Rebel News, but not just me, all of us.
It's why I give you my email address right now at Sheila at RebelNews.com.
Please put gun show letters in the subject line so I know exactly why you're emailing me.
Now, last week's letter comes by way of a regular viewer.
Some, oh, I should tell you, sometimes I take your comments from YouTube or Rumble as well.
So leave a comment there also if you don't want to send me an email directly.
So if you're watching a free clip of the show, put it there.
And your engagement with that content means that it will be served up to more people's eyeballs.
And it's a great free way to support our work here at Rebel News.
Getting back to this week's gun show letter, it comes to me from the email inbox, and it's from a regular viewer, strong supporter of Rebel News for years and years.
It's Bruce Acheson from beautiful Radway, Alberta, and his little cat Delta.
And he writes to me about my interview with Nadine Wellwood.
She's the author of Alberta Rising.
She is someone who has really looked into Alberta independence, Alberta separation, and what that would mean for Albertans.
She's done some work on what an Alberta pension would look like and answering those objections that might come from, I guess, Albertans who are scared, apprehensive, have uncertainties about Alberta's ability to leave Confederation should Albertans choose to do so.
And Bruce writes, what a great show tonight.
I bought a copy of Alberta Rising.
It's on Amazon.
Just search Nadine Wellwood.
And I'll donate it to the local library.
What a great thing to do.
My know-nothing senior friends are afraid we'll lose our pension.
This book will show them the economics, which will give us an even better pension.
We don't even need to leave Canada to get it.
Bruce with sidekick Delta the Cat.
Yeah, that was a point that Nadine made is, you know, we don't even need to leave Canada to get a better deal managing our pensions.
We could have an Alberta pension plan and it would have a greater return than the current CPP.
We just need the political will to do it and the proper education of the people to overcome those fears, apprehensions, and objections.
And I think Nadine does a great job of that in her book.
Again, the book is called Alberta Rising.
You get it on Amazon and you would be supporting a great Alberta author.
And I think Nadine is one.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time in the same place next week.