UCP fumbling primed Albertans to support the teachers’ strike
Danielle Smith left for Saudi Arabia before invoking Notwithstanding Clause
The fall session of the Legislature started on Monday and Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party government wasted no time pushing through its legislation to force striking Alberta teachers back to work.
In a severely time-limited debate that took less than 12 hours in total, UCP MLAs voted on third reading to pass Bill 2: Back to Work Act at around 2:00 a.m. on Tuesday.
The bill imposed a new contract on 51,000 striking teachers until 2028, threatened hefty fines for any teachers who dared defy the UCP’s rushed law, and used the constitutional sledgehammer known as the Notwithstanding Clause to suspend teachers’ and the Alberta Teachers’ Associations’ rights to collective bargaining under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The swift passage of this heavy-handed bill and the invoking of the Notwithstanding Clause to ensure the law could not be challenged in the courts was widely condemned.
“The government has invoked the notwithstanding clause before the Court has had an opportunity to examine the law and determine whether it constitutes a reasonable limit,” wrote Christopher Samuel, President of the Alberta branch of the Canadian Bar Association. “By doing so, they are seeking to remove the judicial branch from the democratic law-making process. If the notwithstanding clause is to be invoked, it should only be used as a tool of last resort, after the Courts have had a chance to examine the legislation.”
“Our representative democracy requires our elected representatives to thoroughly debate, discuss, and consider all proposed laws, particularly laws that are as impactful as the Back to School Act,” wrote Samuel. “Drastic limitations on debate run contrary to these values and risks undermining the core democratic principles of transparency and accountability.”
The use of the Notwithstanding Clause represents a failure of the UCP government to effectively negotiate a deal that was acceptable to both sides and a failure of the government to convince the public that the strike should end.
A Leger poll released this week showed that 60 per cent of Albertans supported the teachers strike and only 14 per cent believed the UCP government did a good job of handling the situation. The same poll showed that 61 per cent of Albertans believe the province is on the wrong track — a jump of 10 points since May 2025.
Smith’s job approval drops, Nenshi gets a bump
Smith’s own approval rating took a beating as well. The Premier saw her job approval drop from 44 per cent in May to 38 per cent this month. And, for the first time, that puts Smith below Nenshi, who saw his approval jump up to 43 per cent in the same period.
Taking his seat in the Legislature this week, it definitely felt like Bill 2 gave Nenshi an opportunity to step into the spotlight and he didn’t disappoint.
Nenshi’s Question Period sparring with Smith was interesting but it was the powerful message he sent to Albertans outside the Dome about the government’s treatment of teachers and its use of brute legal force that reminded political watchers that the former Calgary mayor has some political juice.
It was a glimpse of a clear opposition to the UCP that a lot of Albertans have been waiting for since the NDP were narrowly defeated in the 2023 election.
Smith leaves Canada, flies to Saudi Arabia and Dubai
Albertans’ negative reaction to the government’s handling of the teachers strike was probably a big reason why Smith was scheduled to leave the country before her UCP MLAs passed Bill 2.
We don’t know exactly what Smith was looking at on her phone when she was photographed sitting at the Calgary International Airport while her UCP MLAs were still in the Legislature on Monday night, but her conveniently scheduled week-long trip to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates means that she will not face questions from reporters about suspending constitutional rights of citizens.
Criticism of Smith’s Middle East retreat earned a response from her close advisor and Chief of Staff, Rob Anderson, who responded as he usually does — through an angry post on the Elon Musk-owned X.com (formerly Twitter).
Anderson claimed that Smith’s visit to the oil-rich autocratic kingdoms was part of a plan to “to make a pitch to a trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund for the people Alberta.” As far as I am aware, the government has not ever announced anything about a trillion dollar fund.
The drop in Smith’s job approval and her party’s nine point drop in the polls is a big dent in one of the defining political narratives since the last election: that the UCP has been able to hold steady with a very modest lead in the polls despite Smith’s government implementing a fairly controversial political agenda.
Like a lot of turning points in politics — and it feels like this might be one — opposition success is usually matched by government incompetence or misreading of the public mood. In this case, the UCP spent the past year doing things that ensured public opinion was primed to support the teachers regardless of the government’s advertising campaigns or talking points.
UCP fumbling and scandals primed Albertans to support the teachers’ strike
From the start the start of this school year, Albertans were inundated with news stories and social media posts about principals and teachers being forced to remove or cover up books in school libraries and classrooms to comply with the fumbled book ban law pushed by socially conservative lobby groups and championed by Minister of Education and Childcare Demetrios Nicolaides.
The UCP only backed down from its book ban after it became clear that their heavy-handed criteria actually applied to a wide selection of books that included classics like Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, George Orwell’s “1984”, and Ayn Rand‘s “Atlas Shrugged.”
Then, parents with daughters who wanted to play sports in junior high and high school were forced to sign official government-mandated forms confirming that their daughters were biologically born female at birth. The forms are a key part of the UCP government’s priority of blocking transgender kids from playing school sports.
And then, just when it seemed as if the UCP couldn’t gauge the public mood any more poorly, Nicolaides began to argue that there is no evidence that class size is related to academic achievement. That was not the message that many parents wanted to hear from their government after they just saw their kids return to schools with upwards of 30 or 40 students in a classroom — a direct result of the province’s booming population and the government’s decision to provide the lowest per-capita student funding in Canada.
Teachers said that class sizes was one of the key workload issues that led to the strike.
As Bill 2 was being pushed through the Legislature, Nicolaides pledged to review class sizes and begin collecting class size data that the UCP stopped gathering in 2019 in an effort to “reduce red tape.” But Nicolaides’ record of political fumbles and the Smith government’s heavy-handed response to the teachers’ strike probably won’t give Alberta parents and teachers much confidence that classroom conditions will improve anytime soon.
Related reading
Nicolaides is facing an MLA recall campaign in his Calgary-Bow riding. This is the first MLA recall campaign in Alberta since 1937.
A citizen initiative launched by Calgary teacher Alicia Taylor is collecting in-person petition signatures to support the question: Should the government of Alberta end its current practice of allocating public funds to accredited independent (private) schools?
Interim electoral boundaries report released
The interim report of the Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission was released this week by Speaker Ric McIver. The proposed new electoral map increases the number of provincial ridings from 87 to 89 and, predictably, the new boundaries generated some mixed responses. In particular, Independent Lesser Slave Lake MLA Scott Sinclair and Peace River UCP MLA Dan Williams are not happy with the proposed changes to northern Alberta ridings.
I am planning write more about the interim electoral boundaries report next week.
UCP remains ahead in party fundraising, NDP competitive
Elections Alberta disclosures from the third quarter of 2025 released yesterday show Smith’s UCP raised $1,628,408.26 between July 1 to September 30, putting them slightly ahead of Nenshi’s NDP, which raised $1,191,191.39 in the same period.
The UCP’s third quarter results are slightly below the $1,659,612.21 the governing party raised in the second quarter of this year. The NDP’s third quarter results are also down from the second quarter of 2025 but the opposition party’s fundraising returns remain competitive.
The maximum annual donation to a political party in 2025 is $5,000.
The Pro-Life Political Association, an anti-abortion group, raised $100,309.50 in the same period. The group rarely runs political candidates in elections and uses the registration status of the former Social Credit Party to issue generous political party tax receipts for donations that support its political activities and advertising.
The separatist Republican Party, led by former UCP organizer Cameron Davies, saw its fundraising plummet in the third quarter. The party raised more than $188,000 in the first half of 2025 but only managed to attract $1,772 worth of donations in the third quarter. Davies finished third with 17.6 per cent in the Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills by-election in June 2025.
Rounding out fundraising returns for the smaller parties are the Alberta Party with $11,524.91, the Liberal Party with $7,134.50, the Wildrose Loyalty Coalition with $2,967.79, the Independence Party with $445.85, and the Green Party with $1,108.87.
The Advantage Party, Communist Party, Solidarity Movement, Reform Party, and Wildrose Independence Party reported no donations in the second quarter.
These quarterly reports only tell part of the fundraising story. Changes made by the UCP to political finance laws in 2021 mean that money raised by constituency associations is not included in the quarterly disclosures and is reported annually.
More Alberta politics
The Forever Canadian citizen initiative collected more than 456,000 in-person signatures for its petition asking the question: Do you agree Alberta should remain in Canada?
The stunning success and logistical feat of the petition campaign is a strong show of support by Albertans who wish to remain Canadian and a stunning rebuke of the separatist movement that mocked the Forever Canadian effort.
The separatist Alberta Prosperity Project held a large rally at the Legislature last weekend with a crowd that was estimated to be 8,000 to 10,000 people large.
Among the crowd at the rally were former Drumheller-Stettler UCP MLA Rick Strankman, who sported a “Make Alberta Great Again” red ball cap and current members of the UCP board of directors including Secretary Val Boese, VP Communications Samantha Steinke, and regional directors Al Biel, Brad LaForge, Trudy Corbett, and Vicki Kozmak-LaFrense.
The Alberta government paid out $95 million to Evolve Power to end another lawsuit launched against the government over its coal mining policy flip-flops.
This brings the Alberta government’s overall payout so far to nearly $240 million after a separate agreement reached with Atrum Coal earlier this year included a $143 million payout.
The UCP low-key online contest to pick Alberta’s new license plate design might have hit a snag this week when New Brunswick business owner Denise Dow announced that she holds the trademark to the “Strong and Free” slogan the government wants to add to the new plates.
The proposed slogan is the English translation of the province’s Fortis et Liber motto. It is also the official slogan of the UCP.
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Dave
No matter what people might think about the Alberta teacher's strike, the use of the Notwithstanding Clause in this context is absolutely mind-boggling. The implications are really scary and I think that should be the focus of disucssion in the media. This has gone far beyond the concerns of Alberta teachers. This affects the basic rights of every Canadian. Something has to be done about the use of the notwithstanding clause in general as it is being threatened and used more and more in recent years to curtail the rights of Canadians. The CCLA has written about this before also:
https://ccla.org/major-cases-and-reports/notwithstanding-clause/
And this is from the Canadian Bar Association:
"The preemptive use of the notwithstanding clause cannot be allowed to normalize. Neither should the curtailment of legislative debate become routine. Overuse of these extraordinary measures—especially when coupled with provisions that also set aside the Alberta Bill of Rights and the Alberta Human Rights Act—risks undermining the constitutional and human-rights architecture that protects all Albertans. We cannot take the Rule of Law for granted; if we do, it may not be there to protect our rights when we most need it."
https://cba-alberta.org/news/cba-alberta-statement-on-the-use-of-the-notwithstanding-clause/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I'd like to see the media talk about the implications of this more. This is much bigger than a simple labor dispute. Even the libertarian faction in the MAGA base should be worried about this shouldn't they? They say they are all about preventing government overreach yet here they are supporting this type of draconian circumvension of democratic norms? It's hard to understand where people's minds are at these days.
The financial priorities of this Smith government appear to be rather curious. She gets elected by AB citizens so she can pay millions of government dollars to foreign coal mining interests. Certainly - far better for citizens than investing in schools, classroom resources, teaching and education - right??? And, we still don't know the dirty details on the AHS procurement details and the amount of tax-payer dollars involved in that? Well ... Notwithstanding all these 'investments' who knows what great 'deals' she will return from Saudi Arabia with?? Making AB proud!