An image of a commercial vehicle with line art drawing of the Alberta Legislature building overlaid to represent Public Services.

Public Services

We live in a province where the government is deliberately undermining public services in order to justify privatizing them.

Striking teachers hold signs during a protest at the Alberta Legislature
Photo Credit: Ron Palmer

Underfunding and understaffing are rampant. Almost all of our public services – health care, education, universities and colleges – are on the brink of collapse. Some are over the edge.

We need leaders who will commit to supporting and enhancing our vital public services, rather than destabilizing and dismantling them to advance their political agendas.

In health care, it’s time to:

  • Call a public inquiry into health care corruption scandal. Our public health care system cannot survive if it’s being attacked and undermined from within.
  • Reverse the dismemberment and fragmentation of the system. We only need one bureaucracy, not nine or more.
  • Institute formal nurse-patient ratios. Short-staffing is the root of the crisis currently crippling the system. Funded staffing ratios are a big part of the solution.
  • Develop a health care human resources strategy – one which prioritizes training the workers we need within the province and paying them well enough to attract and retain them.
  • Start the process of bringing all Long-term Care facilities into the public sector. The pandemic showed us that for-profit companies cannot be trusted with the care of our seniors.

In education, it’s time to:

  • Increase K-12 per-pupil spending to the Canadian average. There’s no excuse for a wealthy province like Alberta to spend so little on education. Dead last is not where we want to be.
  • Introduce caps on class size. We can’t let the government get away with saying it can’t be done. Alberta is literally the only province in Canada that doesn’t have caps or student-teacher ratios.
  • The UCP says we have to keep wages for teachers and other education staff in line with other provinces, but they conveniently ignore the fact that we’re WAY out of line with other provinces in terms of per pupil spending and class sizes.
  • Reverse the devastating cuts to our universities, colleges and technical schools. The UCP may not want a well-educated citizenry, but that approach is clearly not in the interests of Albertans. What’s happening in PSE today is economic madness and an assault on our children’s futures.
  • Stop using public money to fund private schools. Ordinary taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for schools their kids can’t afford to attend. This is a thinly-veiled strategy to undermine public education.

In municipalities, it’s time to:

  • Increase provincial cash transfers to municipalities. The UCP’s strategy of starving our cities and towns of cash, while at the same time downloading responsibilities to them, has to stop.
  • Assist municipalities with funding infrastructure and social programs, especially services that address homelessness and addiction
  • Provide provincial funding for public transit operations, not just infrastructure. And that operational funding should be enough to make public transit free for riders.