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Guest Opinion: Cuts at post-secondary level will hurt Alberta

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Franco Terrazzano of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation recently endorsed the Alberta government’s cuts to Alberta post-secondary education, saying it is time to stand up to Alberta’s university and college “union bosses.”

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Putting aside this strange ad hominem insult from a highly paid lobbyist who works for a small and secretive organization to level at public servants, this is another misguided attempt to justify the cuts to post-secondary education to achieve efficiency.

The CTF claims to have studied all university and college collective agreements since 2015 and concluded that our slight wage increases over that time were excessive in comparison to other Albertan workers.

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They miss two important points.

First, faculty salaries are not what the CTF claims they are.

Wage increases from 2015-17 were negotiated before the 2014 recession or came because of arbitration awards.

Since 2017, most faculty contracts have had a negotiated 0% wage increase under both the NDP and UCP regimes.

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That’s four years of no increases.

In fact, the average salary for a full-time faculty member at one of Alberta’s public universities was more than $2,000 (1.6%) below the Canadian university average in 2018-19 and is even lower when accounting for annual inflation.

The CTF leaves the impression all college and university faculty are overpaid, but this suggestion also is patently false: contract academic faculty, who deliver many of the classes in Alberta’s postsecondary institutions, are severely underpaid.

Similar to other workers in the gig economy, contract faculty are paid less, work more, rarely have access to pensions or benefits and, crucially, have no time for the kind of research Albertans need to diversify the provincial economy.

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The over-reliance on ‘efficient’ contract academic staff, who are re-hired to teach ever-larger classes every four month, have no time to devote to creating the long-term research project or writing the grants to fund them.

Efficiency today means less research and even fewer patents to commercialize tomorrow.

Indeed, the CTF’s thirst for efficiency is myopic.

Even the provincial government knows that Alberta competes for academic staff on an international labour market.

It’s hard to see why top researchers, teachers, and scholars would come to Alberta when they can earn more at other Canadian universities, with much more support for their work.

It’s not just the top researchers who won’t come here.

Draconian wage rollbacks will invariably produce a brain drain when highly skilled faculty leave Alberta, taking with them their intellectual property and research grants — just when the province pushes faculty to get Alberta’s “fair share” of federal research grants

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As researchers and professors, we understand that Alberta has seen a large increase in provincial debt and an increase in our students’ tuition.

These are the result of specific policy choices of the current government.

Jason Kenney and the UCP chose to cut corporate taxes even as they authorized annual average tuition increases of 7% over the last three years.

Some programs at the University of Alberta have seen recent increases as high as 104%.

These increases simply offset the massive cuts to our universities and colleges Campus Alberta operating grants since the UCP took power.

The provincial government lost $1.3 billion in its Keystone XL pipeline investment while cutting $400 million from universities and colleges.

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Imagine the return on investment had the UCP inverted that $1.3 billion in the post-secondary education.

More than zero, I am willing to bet.

Alberta’s professors, instructors and researchers will play vital role in diversification efforts for the provincial economy.

Rather than attacking the innovators and teachers of this province, we believe the public wants to support Alberta’s universities and colleges now that we need them the most.

That means we need to stop the post-secondary cuts and start re-investing in the people who drive it.

Lee Easton is president of the Mount Royal Faculty Association and member-at-large, CAFA: Confederation of Alberta Faculty Associations

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