Danielle Smith v. Calgary Board of Education
An early glimpse into the Premier's views on politics, teachers, and public education.
With more than 43,000 members of the Alberta Teachers’ Association overwhelming rejecting the latest contract offer from the provincial government and an October 6 teachers strike fast approaching, a lot of people have been sharing links to a series of articles I wrote 16 years ago about Premier Danielle Smith’s disastrous time on the Calgary Board of Education in the late 1990s.
The four-part series was published in the weeks after Smith won the Wildrose Alliance Party leadership in 2009, which was her first foray into provincial politics, and provides an early glimpse into her politics and her views on teachers and public education.
More than two decades after her short stint as a school trustee and eight years after her time as Wildrose leader came to a dramatic end, Smith became leader of the United Conservative Party and Premier of Alberta in 2022.
Here are the full set of links for anyone interested in reading the four-part series, which lives over at daveberta.ca:
The Calgary Board of Education in those years wasn’t a fiasco just because of Smith, then a young conservative activist, it was a real group effort. But Smith was certainly a key contributor to the political sabotage and poisoned atmosphere that plagued the elected board of public school trustees.
The failure of adults to act in an adult manner, as board chair Teresa Woo-Paw described it in 1999, led Minister of Learning Lyle Oberg to fire the entire board and replace it with one government-appointed trustee until by-elections could be held to elect new trustees.
Smith chose not run in the by-elections and instead was hired by the Calgary Herald as an editorial writer only days before the journalists and writing staff at the newspaper went on strike. While the paper’s reporters were on strike, Smith crossed the picket line as a strikebreaker writer for the Herald.
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Dave