Alberta Politics: United Conservative Party Government tells Alberta nurses: Don’t worry, there’s no list, and you’re not on it! 

VICTORIA, B.C. – Are you wondering why Alberta Health Services would threaten nurses with layoffs in the middle of an international nurse shortage and a national health care crisis at the very moment the province’s governing United Conservative Party is trying to reassure everyone things in health care are just

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Alberta Politics: Kenney Government suddenly backs away from long-brewing big battles with nurses and teachers

Alberta’s United Conservative Party Government has suddenly retreated from controversial battles with nurses and teachers that were a priority for Premier Jason Kenney and his inner circle almost since their election in the spring on 2019. Over the Labour Day weekend, a representative of the Alberta Health Services bargaining committee

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Alberta Politics: As Alberta opens for summer, hospital beds start to close – enjoy your flapjacks while they last!

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and his cadre of new Cowtown cabinet ministers will be flipping pancakes and engaging in cowboy cosplay at a Stampede breakfast in Harley Hotchkiss Gardens in downtown Calgary this morning. The premier’s Stampede breakfast, according to the notice from his press secretary yesterday, “celebrates Alberta being

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Alberta Politics: In what looks like a classic case of bargaining in bad faith, UCP Government demands additional 3% pay cut from more than 30,000 nurses

Alberta Health Services returned to the bargaining table with Alberta’s more than 30,000 public sector registered nurses and registered psychiatric nurses yesterday for the first time since March 2020 with a new demand for a 3-per-cent across-the-board rollback in wages. That’s on top of the more than 100 rollbacks to

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Alberta Politics: Alberta government makes moves to lay off more public employees — this time provincial public service members

No one should assume Saturday’s mass layoff of 26,000 substitute teachers, teaching assistants and non-essential support staff at schools throughout Alberta is the last such action planned by the United Conservative Party Government as it attempts to game federal pandemic supports. In a bargaining update published this morning by the

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Alberta Politics: Inside Jason Kenney’s troll factory: the UCP propaganda ecosystem goes after Alberta’s registered nurses

The president of the Alberta Federation of Labour called out the Canadian Taxpayers Federation yesterday for the partisan role it plays supporting of the Kenney Government’s contract demands in negotiations with the union that represents the province’s front-line registered nurses. Calling the CTF “a secretive anti-union lobby group,” Gil McGowan

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Alberta Politics: Arbitrator’s decision awarding 1% pay increase to some AUPE members undermines UCP austerity arguments

An independent labour arbitrator yesterday awarded unionized Alberta government employees and health care support workers a modest 1-per-cent pay increase for 2019. Having gone into wage-reopener negotiations in the final year of their current collective agreements seeking much higher pay increases ranging from 6.5 to 7.85 per cent, the Alberta

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Alberta Politics: Canadian Taxpayers Federation commentary on nurse salaries isn’t research so much as an echo chamber

Has anyone noticed how the propaganda produced by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation seems to be growing more inept of late? Misleading arguments and anti-union bias have long characterized many of the claims made by the Regina-based CTF, which claims to be a non-partisan “citizens’ group,” although its only legal members

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Alberta Politics: Plan to roll back public employees’ pay is no surprise, but the way it’s being rolled out seems surprisingly inept

When Alberta’s finance minister announced the Kenney Government’s plan to roll back unionized public employees’ pay by 2 to 5 per cent yesterday, he blamed Alberta’s debt and deficit, not the huge hole he’d just blown in the province’s budget with $4.5-billion in tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations.

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Alberta Politics: UCP Government, with no apparent short-term Plan B, seeks leave to appeal injunction suspending Bill 9

Unsurprisingly, the United Conservative Party Government has filed notice of appeal on the temporary injunction granted by the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench that halted application of Bill 9, playing havoc with Premier Jason Kenney’s strategy for putting off a crisis with the province’s public sector unions until after the

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