PIA in the news

On November 20, 2018, to coincide with National Child Day, Public Interest Alberta, the Edmonton Social Planning Council, and the Alberta College of Social Workers published a new child poverty report, One in Six is Too Many: An Alberta Child Poverty Report.

Originally published as a Letter to the Editor in the Edmonton Journal on November 14, 2018.

Re: "Political action committees in Alberta," Oct. 29

I want to provide clarity on my organization’s third-party advertising. As a non-partisan organization, none of our work is done to support or oppose any political party. It is true we have supported a $15-per-hour minimum wage in Alberta, but we were advocating for that well before the NDP decided to make it a 2015 election issue.

Originally published in the September 2018 issue of Alberta Views magazine.

"Our province has Canada’s most generous subsidies for private schools. Setting aside those private schools serving children with special needs, many of which fill gaps in our public systems, the Alberta government spends $110-million per year subsidizing private schools. This would be far better spent supporting students in public schools.

Parents enrolling children in private schools choose to opt out of their local public, Catholic or francophone system. They certainly have the right to do so, but they shouldn’t expect the public to fund that choice. Similarly, public funding makes library books available to anyone at no charge. Some people instead buy books from a bookstore, but they don’t expect the government to subsidize those purchases."

Read the full article.

As Alberta's minimum wage is set to increase from $13.60 to $15.00 per hour by October 1, 2018, a business lobby group has called on the province to freeze the minimum wage at its current rate of $13.60 per hour.

Our executive director, Joel French, debated this proposal on CTV Two's Alberta Primetime program, which aired on August 22nd. Our province has gone on too long allowing workers to be paid poverty-level wages. The minimum wage increase will allow these workers to support their families.

Originally published on July 8, 2018 at Ricochet Media.

Op-ed by Executive Director Joel French originally published in Calgary Herald on August 19, 2017 and in the Edmonton Journal on August 23, 2017.

This op-ed was originally published in the Edmonton Journal, May 18, 2017

As students in every corner of the province headed back to school earlier this month, Public Interest Alberta Executive Director Joel French spoke to CTV Alberta Primetime about the high cost of going back to school.

If the appointment of Kwong See is not followed by a redefinition of the role, the advocacy positions described as a “work in progress” may turn out to be a tragically missed opportunity.

The revenue shortage is a problem that will continue until our provincial government takes significant steps to solve it. There are really only two ways it can be fixed: either raise substantially more revenue, or make massive cuts to public services. Ralph Klein’s government took the latter approach to the extreme by cutting $3 billion from public services. In many ways, the province has still not recovered.