Province made few missteps — until now

‘Reallocated’ education funds came as unwelcome surprise

It is not illogical to consider ways of reallocating resources in response to a crisis, but doing so arbitrarily or capriciously does not seem like an effective way of achieving anything meaningful or productive.

Less than two weeks after Alberta Education Minister Adriana Lagrange had said that school boards would still receive their full funding allotment for 2019-20 and two days before remote learning was to begin in earnest, the province announced that it would be cutting funding for educational assistants, substitute teachers and transportation. That money, we were told, would be “reallocated to support Alberta’s COVID-19 response.”

As for how this decision was reached, how this money would be put to use, or how education would be affected, we were all left to speculate. In fact, it wasn’t even made clear by the province as to what dollar figure this represented ($128 million, as the minister’s press secretary later confirmed) or how many people would be laid off (up to 25,000, by some estimates). This was an announcement made via press release — on a Saturday, no less.

I suspect Albertans are generally sympathetic to the fact that the provincial government is trying to respond to an unprecedented and constantly evolving crisis situation, but it’s also not unfair to question or criticize its decision-making process. (Full disclosure: I have an in-law who is an educational assistant.)

Again, it’s not unreasonable to look at how the needs of teachers and school boards have changed and will change in the coming weeks (and it should be noted that school fees have not yet been refunded — the province’s logic here should cut both ways), but that’s a process that implies some level of feedback and consultation. At the very least, school boards should have been made aware of this much sooner. Instead, this announcement seemed to catch everyone by surprise.

So where does this leave teachers, students and families who rely on the work of educational assistants? How does the province see that void being filled? Lagrange insists that this won’t impact learning, but it’s not at all clear whether that’s actually the case.

There are several other questions raised by this decision.

For example, the recently passed budget included a $500-million increase to health-care funding and it does not appear as though that money needed to be reallocated from any other department. So has something changed? Does the budget already need to be revisited? The premier or the finance minister really ought to explain what’s going on here and what this reallocation implies.

If future decisions about funding Alberta’s COVID-19 response will now automatically entail reallocating funds from other departments, it would be helpful to have a more fulsome explanation as to how that is going to work and what impact it will have.

There’s also the question of whether it makes sense for provinces to be adding to the burden of applications for the federal government’s temporary income support program.

It’s not ideal to have public servants doing no work while remaining on the payroll, but if provinces start slashing their workforces and leaving Ottawa to pick up the slack, then that could cause serious problems for the federal response.

The education minister also insists that this cut is meant to be temporary, but she also said two weeks ago that there wouldn’t be a cut in the first place. It’s certainly understandable then that people might be reluctant to put much faith in this commitment.

But if the cut is meant to be temporary, then it’s hard to see what the point of it is if the money is simply going to be “reallocated” right back.

As someone who has generally been complimentary of the province’s overall response to this pandemic, I must say that I’m finding it hard to give it the benefit of the doubt on this one.

This is a decision that was quite poorly communicated and quite possibly poorly conceived.