Media releases

EDMONTON - The Alberta government has released its provincial budget amid the COVID-19 pandemic. While the government promised not to make any significant cuts, the budget keeps in place cuts that had already been made across all areas of public services in previous years, while deepening cuts in several areas including a continued freeze to critical programs such as Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped (AISH) and Income Support.

EDMONTON - As a part of their coalition campaign, the organizations behind StopPSEcuts.ca have released the results of a survey which was sent out to the staff, faculty, and students in the post-secondary sector, as well as the public at large. The survey demonstrates a staggering lack of trust in the provincial government’s intentions for the sector.

EDMONTON - Public Interest Alberta has released the results of its biennial Child Care Operator Survey. The survey respondents highlighted the struggles the sector is experiencing during the COVID-19 pandemic, and shows how government cuts to sector funding is making a difficult situation even worse.

EDMONTON - A coalition of organizations representing more than 154,000 undergraduate and graduate students, 11,000 faculty and instructors, and 13,000 support staff in Alberta’s post-secondary education system has launched a new campaign at www.stopPSEcuts.ca, headlined by the slogan “working conditions are learning conditions.” The campaign aims to raise Albertans’ awareness of the negative impacts of the significant cuts the provincial government has made over the past two years to post-secondary education and pressure politicians to change direction.

EDMONTON - The Alberta College of Social Workers, the Edmonton Social Planning Council, and Public Interest Alberta have jointly released a report on the state of child and family poverty in Alberta, Spotlight: Lessons on Child Poverty in a Pandemic.

EDMONTON - The Alberta government has begun consultations for the next provincial budget, set to be released in February 2021. A key part of the consultation is a survey which asks Albertans to respond to several questions about budget priorities. However, the background information given for the survey and the consultations as a whole contains information that is either given without context or out of context in order to direct the thinking of respondents to the answers the government wants to receive.

EDMONTON - The Alberta provincial government has given the green light to the first new charter school in 13 years after the Black Gold public school division shuttered a rural elementary school in June 2020.

This October 1st marks the 30th anniversary of the International Day of Older Persons. This year, as we contend with the ongoing upheaval caused by the COVID-19 global health crisis, we must also bear witness to the suffering caused by the long-standing failures of our seniors’ care system. 

Seniors have suffered the greatest impact of the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, and Alberta is no exception. To date 97% of COVID-related deaths have been Albertans aged 60 or older, including 165 residents in continuing care. In July, the Royal Society of Canada found that 81% of COVID-19 deaths nationwide were residents of long-term care homes—a rate far outpacing other countries. Further, the worst impacts have occurred in for-profit facilities, which have been found to have had “more extensive outbreaks and more deaths” than public facilities. COVID-19 has exposed the many shortcomings of our seniors’ care system, borne of decades of privatization and the inequity that perpetual cost-cutting has wrought. What we are seeing now was decades in the making.

EDMONTON -  Despite last week’s announcement of $262.8 million in federal funding to help re-open Alberta schools safely, public education advocates are still ringing the alarm about conditions in Alberta’s classrooms. The 2002 Alberta Commission on Learning (ACOL) set targets for school class sizes that the province has consistently failed to meet.

As a part of the Alberta government’s economic recovery plan, the province’s corporate tax rate is being cut by two percent, from 10 percent to 8 percent, as of July 1. Premier Kenney justified the move as a way to increase economic activity and create jobs, neither of which have been proven effects of such a change.