Marco Navarro-Génie

They Built a Sustaining Rainbow Bureaucracy Instead of a Warchest

Alberta’s teachers walked off the job twice in a few years, which surprised anyone who still believed the old line that teachers avoid confrontation. A strike strips an organization to its essentials. It reveals whether a union carries real strength or only the appearance of it. When the Alberta Teachers’ Association entered a province-wide strike, it took on the posture of a century-old institution, but it drew on reserves of something far younger and far leaner. One question hangs in the air: How did a union that has existed since 1918 arrive at a major labour showdown with so little capacity to sustain its members?

The answer, it turns out, is that the ATA spent a century perfecting the art of growing and protecting itself, but not the teachers who pay for it.

Early unions understood that withdrawing labour meant stepping into a void. Wages vanished at the factory door. Families survived on whatever the union could provide. From small collections grew one of the essential principles of organized labour: A union prepares for conflict by saving in peacetime. It builds the means to protect its members when negotiations break down.

When unions matured, industrial organizations built strike funds large enough to hold firm through prolonged stalemates. These reserves became equalizers. Without them, employers waited for hunger to do the work. With them, a union could bargain in earnest. Strike pay bought time. Time forced movement. Time was power.

Consider what proper unions accomplish. CUPE maintains a national strike fund holding $132.8 million as of 2023. With 650,000 members, that’s about $200 per member in reserve. CUPE pays striking workers $300 per week from day one, rising to $350 after eight weeks. OPSEU maintains a $70 million strike fund, paying $200 per week plus $50 per dependent, increasing to $300 per week at week four.

By contrast, the ATA had $25 million in its Special Emergency Fund when the recent strike began. That money lasted just over two weeks, covering member benefits, not strike pay. For a union with 51,000 members, that’s less than $500 per teacher. After those two weeks, the Association drained its general cash reserves. By the end of the three-week strike, the SEF was depleted. Compare this to CUPE’s $132 million for 650,000 members or OPSEU’s $70 million for 180,000 members, and the ATA’s inadequacy becomes stark.

A century of life gives any organization the chance to build such strength. Over decades it becomes serious. Over a century it becomes formidable. Yet when the association decided to strike on October 6, 2025, it had nothing approaching the reserve needed for a long contest. A union prepared for endurance needs a fund measured in the high tens of millions, not the low twenties. That cushion was missing.

Of course, it was missing. Building a war chest means acknowledging you might actually have to fight a war. Far safer to build a peacetime palace and hope nobody notices when the enemy arrives at the gates.

This weakness grew from the inward turn that overtakes institutions with stable revenue and public status. What begins as a tool for members becomes an organism that primarily protects itself. After the Teaching Profession Act of 1936 entrenched its place in Alberta’s landscape, the ATA expanded like any other public body—without constraint or self-examination. Staff increased. Departments multiplied. New programs became permanent fixtures. Over time, the structure thickened into bureaucracy.

Robert Michels observed more than a century ago that organizations drift toward oligarchy because staff become the custodians of continuity. Members cycle in and out. Staff remain. As this instinct grows, the organization develops a belief that its first duty is to preserve itself. The ATA is no exception. Salaries for staff, internal operations, communication units, legal services, research branches, and advocacy initiatives occupy the foreground of its budget. The association’s annual budget is approximately $50 million, with discretionary programming accounting for less than a quarter. The remainder goes to staff salaries, operations, and fixed expenditures. A strike fund becomes an afterthought. Annual fees for 2025-26 are set at $1,422 per teacher, generating roughly $72 million in yearly revenue. Where did it all go?

The ATA’s books are not open, but there is public evidence of where some spending goes. Much went to campaigns that had precious little to do with wages, benefits, or working conditions. The ATA maintains an elaborate apparatus devoted to social justice advocacy. It supports the Alberta GSA Network, produces extensive resources on sexual and gender minorities, runs a “Walking Together” reconciliation program complete with 25 Indigenous education facilitators, publishes anti-racism materials, maintains Diversity Equity Networks, and employs staff dedicated to promoting SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) inclusion in classrooms. When Premier Danielle Smith announced policies requiring parental notification for name and pronoun changes in schools, the ATA mobilized its complete communications apparatus to oppose the measures, with President Jason Schilling calling them “irresponsible and dangerous” and a “distraction from more important issues.” If that were so, Schilling allowed his organization to be distracted.

I am not passing judgment on whether their causes lack merit or that teachers shouldn’t care about them. That’s their business and their money. But a union exists first and foremost to protect the material interests of its members. When teachers lose a month’s salary because their union spent decades building a rainbow bureaucracy instead of a strike fund, the priorities become clear. The ATA allocated resources to produce toolkits on creating “SOGI-inclusive classrooms” and funded campaigns about transgender policy while its Special Emergency Fund remained woefully inadequate. It hired facilitators to deliver workshops on dismantling anti-Indigenous racism, but couldn’t pay striking teachers a dime. This is ideology dressed up as unionism, performance masquerading as protection.

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And here’s the greater irony: when teachers walked the picket lines, union executives kept drawing their salaries. Strike or no strike, the apparatus hummed along. The people running the ATA never missed a paycheque while the members they represent watched their bank accounts drain. In the 2025 strike, teachers lost a month’s salary. In return for this sacrifice, they gained precisely nothing. The settlement forced upon them by the government’s Back to School Act offered no improvement over what was available before they walked out. In fact, 89.5 per cent of teachers had already rejected this very offer on September 29, before the strike even began. In an era of persistent inflation, that lost income hurts. It hurt while union apparatchiks cashed their cheques on schedule.

The pattern of misplaced priorities extends beyond budgeting. When governments announce reforms, the ATA responds with press conferences, research papers, social media campaigns, and policy briefs. These are the tools of a professional bureaucracy, revolutionary in rhetoric, managerial in practice. They convey activity. They project influence. They cost a fortune. The ATA spent approximately $1.2 million on communications advocacy campaigns. Yet none of these tools matter when the government decides to hold firm during wage negotiations. Only endurance matters. Endurance rests on savings. Discipline has been scarce, but glossy newsletters have been plentiful.

The ATA fashions itself as the vanguard of progressive change, draping its pronouncements in the language of social justice and systemic transformation. It speaks like Che Guevara but budgets like a mid-tier insurance company. This is the defanged wolf: all growl, no bite. When push comes to shove, when teachers actually need material support to withstand a strike and make it count, the revolutionary rhetoric evaporates like morning dew. What remains is a comfortable administrative class that has confused advocacy theatre with actual power.

For a union that seeks to control so much of the province’s educational life, the ATA demonstrated a remarkable inability to control its own strike capacity. When the moment arrived to exercise the most fundamental power a union possesses—the withdrawal of labour—it had nothing. This is not the behaviour of a serious labour organization. This is the behaviour of a professional association that occasionally remembers it is supposed to be a union.

The ATA speaks of solidarity and resolve. It encourages teachers to show unity. It frames strikes as moral moments. It talks tough, pushed by its political branch, the NDP. Yet solidarity without resources is fragile. Resolve without savings falters when the bills arrive. A union that accepts going on strike without the means to sustain its membership hands the employer a strategic advantage from the outset. Employers read the same budgets. A union with a thin reserve can shout but cannot stand long, no matter what assurances Nenshi and their political allies make. The employer knows time will do the work. The people insulated from this reality are the NDP MLAs who cheered them on and the union administrators whose paycheques never depend on winning the fight.

It becomes difficult to tell whether the ATA has become an arm of the NDP or whether the NDP serves as the political branch of the ATA. Either way, the relationship has proven costly and fruitless. Opposition leader Naheed Nenshi stood ready with soundbites throughout the strike, encouraging teachers to hold firm while offering nothing of material value. NDP MLAs treated striking teachers and disrupted students as convenient instruments to embarrass the government, cheering on a labour action that could never succeed without the financial backing to sustain it. The enemy of your employer is not necessarily your friend. An independent union would have recognized this and built its strength accordingly, rather than spending resources and political capital on an alliance that delivers applause but not wages.

But it’s a professional association and not a conventional trade union, many will say. Members chose to strike against the leadership’s recommendations. That only seals the argument: It is an admission that the organization has no business going on strike. And if the membership voted for a strike, the leadership should have resigned. No youth leader would ever accept leading Girl Guides into a battlefield against seasoned warriors.

If the NDP functions as the political arm of the ATA, then the union has wasted considerable time and treasure on a supremely ineffective partner. A union serious about protecting its members would invest in strike capacity, not in subsidizing a moribund political movement that cannot deliver victories.

The institutional incentives explain much of this failure. Once an organization builds programs and layers of administration, cutting them becomes painful. Every department has defenders. Every initiative has champions. A strike fund has no constituency except prudence, and prudence has no allies among radicals. Prudence is no match for the seductive appeal of another communications coordinator or tattoo-covered diversity officer. Virtue-signalling solidarity wants no sacrifice. It is easier still when the people making these decisions know they will be paid regardless of whether the teachers they represent can hold out through week three of a strike.

Alberta teachers should demand clarity. They have paid dues for generations. They are told the association exists to protect them. Protection cannot be rhetorical. It must take the form of financial strength when the moment demands it. If the ATA built a bureaucracy instead of a war chest, if it prioritized the comfort of its administrative class over the security of its members, then teachers deserve that truth without varnish. They deserve to know why their union leadership never missed a meal while asking them to tighten their belts for the cause.

The defanged wolf is hurt now. It lashes out with its claws, backing recall campaigns against elected officials and organizing petitions to defund non-ATA school instruction. A Calgary high school teacher and ATA governing council representative wants to end public funding for Alberta’s independent schools, where roughly 2,000 teachers work outside ATA membership, costing the association approximately $2.84 million in foregone dues revenue annually. The petition to defund independent schools masquerades as concern for public education but reeks of institutional self-interest. Those 2,000 teachers represent nearly $3 million in annual dues that never reach ATA coffers. The defunding campaign is not about protecting students. It is about eliminating competition and conscripting teachers into membership. This is the Borg logic of an assimilating monopoly, not solidarity.

Wolves can be declawed, too. A union that cannot win at the bargaining table but insists on fighting everywhere else will find itself further diminished, further isolated, and ultimately less able to serve the teachers who still pay its bills. Vindictiveness is not a substitute for competence, and performative rage cannot replace the strength that comes from prudent preparation.

A century of dues offered the ATA a chance to build real power for its members. That chance slipped away into offices, programs, campaigns, and the salaries of people who never had to worry about surviving a strike because they were never actually on strike. The next century should begin with a different understanding of duty, rooted in prudence rather than performance, in stewardship rather than self-preservation, and in the recognition that a union leadership that doesn’t share the risks of its members has no business sending them into battle.

A defanged wolf can howl all it wants. Until it grows its teeth back, no one needs to take it seriously.

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Marco Navarro-Génie

When educators argue that children who don’t fit their system should have nowhere else to go, you’re witnessing institutional self-interest dressed up as social justice.

A petition is making its way through Alberta that could fundamentally reshape education in the province, and not for the better. The “Alberta Funds Public Schools” initiative, launched by Calgary high school teacher Alicia Taylor, asks a deceptively simple question: “Should the Government of Alberta end its current practice of allocating public funds to accredited independent (private) schools?”

Taylor isn’t just any teacher. She’s a Calgary district representative on the Alberta Teachers’ Association’s governing council. And while the ATA has been careful to maintain that this is Taylor’s personal initiative, they’ve conspicuously failed to repudiate it. In fact, ATA president Jason Schilling has publicly stated that members “take exception” to public dollars going to private schools, while simultaneously claiming the association’s policy isn’t “against private schools.” This is the kind of rhetorical contorsions that deserves scrutiny.

The timing is telling. The petition was approved just as 51,000 Alberta teachers launched the province’s first-ever province-wide strike. Taylor called this “a happy accident,” noting that striking teachers now have “a little more spare time than normal” to collect signatures. When your “personal initiative” coincidentally launches during a labor action and benefits from union members’ sudden availability, reasonable people might wonder how personal it really is.

To be fair, let’s present the strongest version of the argument Taylor and her supporters are making. They claim that Alberta spends the least per student in Canada on public education while funding private schools at 70%, the highest rate in the country. This creates what they see as a perverse incentive structure: public money flowing to selective institutions while universal public schools struggle with overcrowding and teacher shortages.

The math seems straightforward: $461 million currently goes to independent schools serving about 50,000 students. Redirect that money to the public system serving over 600,000 students, and you could fund thousands of teachers and educational assistants. You could reduce class sizes. You could provide more support for struggling students.

They argue this is about fairness and democratic accountability. Taxpayers fund education for the common good, and that investment should go to schools that must accept every student, not selective alternatives that can charge tuition on top of public subsidies. Private schools exist and thrive in Ontario without public funding. Why should Alberta be different?

Moreover, they contend, the current system subsidizes exit from the public system, creating a vicious cycle where families with resources opt out, taking their advocacy and engagement with them, leaving behind an increasingly residualized public system serving the most vulnerable students.

Underlying much of this argument is a class-based resentment: the notion that some families can access alternatives amounts to unfair privilege. This framing reveals more about the advocates than about education policy. Envy is never a good look in educators. When teachers’ unions frame educational choice as a problem because some families have options others don’t, they’re not arguing for equity. They’re arguing for enforced equality of limitation, where if not everyone can have something, no one should.

It sounds compelling. It’s also dangerously wrong.

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Let’s start with the most fundamental flaw in this argument: taking the money doesn’t make the students disappear. Nearly 50,000 students attend independent schools in Alberta, plus another 8,000 in private early childhood programs. These children don’t vanish if funding is eliminated. They flood into a public system that petition supporters themselves admit is already overcrowded. The math is straightforward: forcing these students back into public schools would cost taxpayers an additional $300 million, more than the government’s most recent settlement offer to teachers. This is about forcing conformity at massive cost, while improving nothing.

But the financial argument, while important, pales beside the human cost. Consider what this petition really proposes: eliminating educational options for approximately 80% of independent school families whose income is at or below the provincial average. These aren’t wealthy elites. They’re middle-income families making sacrifices to access education that works for their children.

The class warfare rhetoric of the petition obscures this reality. When advocates frame school choice as privilege, they ignore that Alberta’s funding model specifically makes choice accessible to families who couldn’t otherwise afford it. Eliminating this doesn’t level the playing field. It simply ensures that only the truly wealthy retain educational options.

Here’s what makes this proposal particularly egregious: its devastating impact on neurodiverse learners. Many of the fastest-growing independent schools in Alberta serve students with special learning needs. These are children who struggled, or failed, in standard public school classrooms. They’re students with ADHD who need smaller classes and more movement. They’re autistic students who thrive with structured routines and specialized approaches. They’re kids with dyslexia who need intensive, systematic literacy intervention that their public school couldn’t provide.

The petition’s supporters blithely suggest these students should return to the very system that couldn’t serve them. When teachers are striking over classroom complexity and overcrowding, the proposed solution is to add tens of thousands more students, many with intensive needs, to those same classrooms. This is illogical and cruel.

The ATA argues that a “well-funded public system should be meeting the needs of those kids in the first place.” Should. That’s doing a lot of work in that sentence. Yes, the public system *should* meet every child’s needs. But it doesn’t. And there’s no evidence that simply throwing more money at the problem will change that.

Whatever challenges Alberta’s public schools face, it’s naive and simplistic to believe more money will fix them. There is no study in the world that connects higher teacher wages with better educational outcomes. The problems in public education are complex, structural, and often resistant to solutions that amount to “spend more.”

Neurodiverse students aren’t one-size-fits-all. A student who thrives in a Montessori environment with hands-on learning and self-directed exploration might struggle in a traditional classroom. A student who needs the structure and explicit instruction of a classical education might flounder with inquiry-based learning. An autistic student might do brilliantly in a small school with consistent routines and sensory-aware design, but melt down daily in a crowded comprehensive school.

Eliminating funding for independent schools eliminates options, period. It tells families: your child must fit into our system, or fail. For neurodiverse learners, this is often a sentence to years of struggle, frustration, and educational failure.

But this goes beyond neurodiversity. It’s about every kind of educational diversity. Alberta’s independent schools include French immersion programs, Indigenous-focused schools, classical academies, arts-intensive programs, schools with specific pedagogical approaches, faith-based education reflecting diverse religious traditions, and schools serving new Canadian communities with specific cultural and linguistic needs.

This is educational pluralism: the recognition that in a diverse democracy, different families have different values, different children have different needs, and no single approach serves everyone well. The ATA’s position, however much they try to obscure it, is that this diversity is a problem to be solved. That public money should only support one kind of school: the government-run, union-staffed, standardized public school. Every other option should be available. if at all, only to families wealthy enough to afford full-freight tuition.

This entrenches inequality rather than reducing it. Right now, Alberta’s funding model democratizes choice. A middle-income family whose child isn’t thriving in public school has options. Eliminate public funding, and those options exist only for the wealthy. The result is a rigid two-tier system where the rich can escape and everyone else is trapped.

The envious framing of the ATA’s position becomes clearer here. They see that some families can access alternatives and conclude the problem is the alternatives, not the lack of universal access. This is the logic of enforced mediocrity: if we can’t give everyone excellent options, we’ll eliminate the excellent options that exist. It’s a race to the bottom masquerading as equity.

Let’s be honest about what’s really happening here. The ATA represents teachers in public schools. It has no role in independent schools. Every student in an independent school is a student in a classroom where the union has no power, no collective bargaining rights, and no ability to call strikes that disrupt families.

When Taylor notes that families with children in independent schools experienced “business as usual” during the strike while public school families scrambled for childcare, she’s unwittingly making the case against her own position. Educational diversity means resilience. It means not every family is held hostage to a single system’s labor disputes.

The union has an institutional interest in maximizing enrollment in schools where it holds power. This petition advances that interest. That’s no coincidence. The careful distance the ATA maintains (“It’s not our petition, but we agree with its goals”) is transparent political cover.

Here’s the assumption underlying this entire petition: if we eliminate alternatives and force all students into the public system, somehow that system will improve. This is supremely naive. Suppressing educational variety and choice won’t improve the ails of the public system. It will simply trap more students in whatever problems already exist. If public schools are struggling with classroom management, adding students who left won’t help. If they’re struggling with diverse learning needs, adding students with intensive special needs won’t help. If they’re struggling with overcrowding, adding 50,000 more students certainly won’t help.

The theory seems to be that if we eliminate choice, the system will be forced to improve to meet everyone’s needs. But that’s not how monopolies work. When you have captive customers with no alternatives, the pressure to improve actually decreases. Competition, choice, and the possibility of exit are what create pressure for systems to innovate and serve their clients well.

Educational diversity makes everyone better off. It provides options for students who struggle in traditional settings. It allows innovation and experimentation. It respects that families have different values and priorities. It creates competitive pressure that benefits all schools. And it even costs taxpayers less because families contribute tuition on top of partial public funding.

The Taylor petition claims to be about fairness and adequate resources. In reality, it’s about control and conformity. It would devastate neurodiverse learners, reduce educational variety, eliminate options for middle-income families, and force tens of thousands of students into an already overcrowded system, all while costing taxpayers hundreds of millions more.

And for what? The promise that somehow, magically, removing alternatives will make the remaining system better? That’s wishful thinking dressed up as education policy.

The ATA may not have officially endorsed this petition, but they haven’t repudiated it either. Their silence is instructing, considering that no one would benefit most from the success of such petition than the ATA. And Alberta families, especially those with children who learn differently, should pay attention to what that silence means for their future choices.

When Taylor launched this petition as a “Calgary district representative on the Alberta Teachers’ Association’s governing council,” whatever the pretense of privacy, she wasn’t acting in a vacuum. When the ATA president publicly supports the petition’s goals while maintaining plausible deniability about its origin, that’s a political strategy. When striking teachers use their “spare time” to collect signatures for a petition that would eliminate non-union schools, that’s campaign coordination.

The envious rhetoric about “privilege” and “fairness” obscures what this petition does. It doesn’t help struggling students. It doesn’t improve public education. It doesn’t create equity. It eliminates options for middle-income families. It’s the worst kind of class politics: making everyone worse off in the name of equality.

Educational diversity is a necessity for a functioning pluralistic society. It’s essential for neurodiverse learners who don’t fit the standard mold. It’s crucial for families who want education that reflects their values. And it’s fundamental to the idea that parents, not government bureaucrats or union officials, should have the primary say in their children’s education.

Any proposal to eliminate educational diversity, whatever its rhetorical packaging, deserves to fail. And Albertans should see this petition for what it truly is: an institutional power play to eliminate competition and force conformity, motivated more by envy than by any genuine concern for educational outcomes.

The stakes are high. Educational freedom, once lost, is extraordinarily difficult to regain. When educators tell you that children who don’t fit their system should have nowhere else to go, believe them. Then fight back. Alberta families should resist this petition with everything they have.

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