Province shares plan for school relaunch

From the Province of Alberta

Students returning to school for 2020-21 school year

Students will return to learning in classrooms across Alberta at the beginning of the new school year.

Schools will be ready to welcome students under scenario 1, which is near-normal daily operations with health measures.

Alberta’s government has developed a re-entry tool kit to prepare parents and students for what to expect in the new school year. The tool kit includes videos for students explaining some of the health measures, a guide for parents, frequently asked questions, school posters, a self-screening questionnaire in multiple languages, and links to health guidelines.

“Alberta continues moving ahead with our recovery and relaunch plan. I’m proud of our comprehensive plan that supports the safe return to daily in-school learning. The return of more than 750,000 students to near-normal learning in the new school year is indicative of Alberta’s continued recovery as we work to relaunch our economy and return to our regular everyday lives.”

Jason Kenney, Premier

“We are determined to do everything that we can to safely return our students, teachers and staff to school. I appreciate the input and support of school authorities across the province, as well as our education partners, in developing and refining our school re-entry plan. We are providing clear and detailed guidelines and a re-entry tool kit so everyone can do their part and prepare for a safe return to school.”

Adriana LaGrange, Minister of Education

“We are committed to doing everything possible to protect the health and safety of students, staff and families during the upcoming school year. There is no risk-free approach to COVID-19 but there are also risks to children’s overall health from school closures. We are continually refining our public health advice for schools based on best available evidence. We also have plans in place to respond quickly when cases are identified. Limiting the spread of the virus in schools will require the dedication and support of all Albertans when the school year begins this fall.”

Dr. Deena Hinshaw, chief medical officer of health

Under scenario 1, schools will implement a number of public health measures, which include frequent cleaning of surfaces, placing hand sanitizers at school entrances and classrooms, grouping students in cohorts, and planning the school day to allow for physical distancing, which could include staggering start times for classes, recesses and lunches. Additional public health measures may be established prior to September on the advice of the chief medical officer of health in consultation with the education system.

In addition, students, staff, parents and school visitors will be expected to use a self-screening questionnaire daily to determine whether they can enter the school.

“The Alberta School Boards Association is pleased that this plan was released earlier than expected as it provides more time for finalizing school board plans. We appreciate the various experts, parents and community members that helped inform a plan that prioritizes the health and safety of students and staff. ASBA and all school boards will work diligently to implement this plan and look forward to continuing to work with the Minister of Education throughout the upcoming school year.”

Lorrie Jess, president, Alberta School Boards Association

“The College of Alberta School Superintendents appreciates the opportunity to work alongside government and education partners to develop a detailed re-entry plan. The CASS board of directors strongly believes that the re-entry plan offers the appropriate balance of guidance from the chief medical officer of health and the government while providing for the authority and autonomy for individual school divisions to assure their students, parents and staff that a successful return to school will be safe.”

Bevan Daverne, president, College of Alberta School Superintendents

“We value the government’s efforts to actively work with the education system, including independent schools, as they finalized details for the 2020-21 school year. Re-entry under scenario 1 gives us the information and confidence we need to prepare our schools for reopening. We appreciate the requirements set out by the government to ensure that student and staff safety remains the priority as we navigate through these times to safely move closer towards a sense of normalcy.”

Simon Williams, president, Association of Independent Schools & Colleges in Alberta

“The health of students and staff is the priority. In our recent survey on re-entry, 86 per cent of parents that participated indicated they were in favour of a return to school plan for K-12 students. Community efforts are essential to ensure a safe learning environment for our children.”

Brandi Rai, president, Alberta School Councils’ Association

“The Association of Alberta Public Charter Schools is pleased the government invested the time to engage with the education system as they pragmatically developed the 2020-21 school re-entry plan. This announcement provides Alberta’s public charter schools with the confidence and responsiveness they need to ensure a safe and successful return for the upcoming school year.”

Ron Koper, chair, The Association of Alberta Public Charter Schools

Successful transition to summer school and child care

Alberta’s school re-entry plan works, and already has mitigated risks to students and teachers. Throughout the summer, the Calgary Catholic Separate School Division ran in-person summer school programming in accordance to the guidelines developed and issued by the province. These comprehensive guidelines have mitigated risk, resulting in no COVID-19 outbreaks among teachers or students participating in summer school.

Additionally, Alberta has seen a successful reopening of child care centres across the province. Children and staff have safely returned to these centres with no outbreaks occurring.

School authority funding

School authorities have returned to full funding levels as of July 1, and every school authority in Alberta is receiving a funding increase for the 2020-21 school year – roughly $120 million across the province. A list of funding for every school authority is available here.

In addition, the Minister of Education has approved the use of school board reserves, if needed, to help cover local COVID-19-related costs. The total amount of money sitting in school board reserves is $363 million.

Accelerated capital school funding

The province has also provided school boards an additional $250 million to support accelerated capital maintenance and renewal projects, as part of the more than $10 billion infrastructure spending announced in the Alberta Recovery Plan.

This funding supports infrastructure enhancements that will help in a COVID-19 learning environment. Seventy-nine school projects totalling $15 million are moving forward with this primary purpose, including upgrades for enhanced hygiene such as hands-free sinks, automatic flush toilets, touchless soap and paper towel dispensers, automatic doors and water bottle filling stations to replace water fountains.

New online Student Learning Hub

A new Student Learning Hub on new.learnalberta.ca is available for parents, students, and teachers to more easily access educational materials to support development of student literacy and numeracy, and provide health and wellness information.

The online hub is another resource to support Alberta’s school re-entry plan, with recognition that more online learning resources may be needed during the upcoming school year. Additional resources will also be added throughout the school year.

Expanding diploma exams

Diploma exams will be offered in every subject in the November and April exam sessions. Expanding the offerings of the diploma exams will support school authorities who are shifting high school programming to a four-semester system as part of their COVID-19 re-entry plan. This shift allows for better cohorting by limiting the number of classes a student is in during a term without affecting total learning time over the course of a year.

Personal protective equipment

Students and staff may wear a mask if they choose to. However, practices such as physical distancing, cohorting, frequent handwashing, staying home when sick and increased cleaning of surfaces will continue to be the priority public health measures.

COVID-19 cases at school

If a student or staff tests positive for COVID-19, a public health team will investigate to determine when symptoms developed and support the school to minimize transmission.

While each case will be addressed based on its unique circumstances, it is anticipated that in most cases only the group of students and staff who came in close contact will likely be required to stay home for 14 days, and not the entire school population.

Parents will be notified if a case of COVID-19 is confirmed at school and public health officials will contact those who were in close contact with that person.

Transitioning to scenario 2 or scenario 3

If there is an outbreak of COVID-19 in a community or school, health officials will work with Alberta Education and impacted school authorities to make any decision to potentially transition to partial in-class learning or at-home learning. Decisions will be based on multiple factors including the number of cases in a community or school and the risk of ongoing transmission.

The health guidance for scenario 2 has been updated to allow for a maximum of 20 students per class.

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Ottawa-Alberta agreement may produce oligopoly in the oilsands

Published on December 24, 2025

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From the Fraser Institute

By Jason Clemens and Elmira Aliakbari

The federal and Alberta governments recently jointly released the details of a memorandum of understanding (MOU), which lays the groundwork for potentially significant energy infrastructure including an oil pipeline from Alberta to the west coast that would provide access to Asia and other international markets. While an improvement on the status quo, the MOU’s ambiguity risks creating an oligopoly.

An oligopoly is basically a monopoly but with multiple firms instead of a single firm. It’s a market with limited competition where a few firms dominate the entire market, and it’s something economists and policymakers worry about because it results in higher prices, less innovation, lower investment and/or less quality. Indeed, the federal government has an entire agency charged with worrying about limits to competition.

There are a number of aspects of the MOU where it’s not sufficiently clear what Ottawa and Alberta are agreeing to, so it’s easy to envision a situation where a few large firms come to dominate the oilsands.

Consider the clear connection in the MOU between the development and progress of Pathways, which is a large-scale carbon capture project, and the development of a bitumen pipeline to the west coast. The MOU explicitly links increased production of both oil and gas (“while simultaneously reaching carbon neutrality”) with projects such as Pathways. Currently, Pathways involves five of Canada’s largest oilsands producers: Canadian Natural, Cenovus, ConocoPhillips Canada, Imperial and Suncor.

What’s not clear is whether only these firms, or perhaps companies linked with Pathways in the future, will have access to the new pipeline. Similarly, only the firms with access to the new west coast pipeline would have access to the new proposed deep-water port, allowing access to Asian markets and likely higher prices for exports. Ottawa went so far as to open the door to “appropriate adjustment(s)” to the oil tanker ban (C-48), which prevents oil tankers from docking at Canadian ports on the west coast.

One of the many challenges with an oligopoly is that it prevents new entrants and entrepreneurs from challenging the existing firms with new technologies, new approaches and new techniques. This entrepreneurial process, rooted in innovation, is at the core of our economic growth and progress over time. The MOU, though not designed to do this, could prevent such startups from challenging the existing big players because they could face a litany of restrictive anti-development regulations introduced during the Trudeau era that have not been reformed or changed since the new Carney government took office.

And this is not to criticize or blame the companies involved in Pathways. They’re acting in the interests of their customers, staff, investors and local communities by finding a way to expand their production and sales. The fault lies with governments that were not sufficiently clear in the MOU on issues such as access to the new pipeline.

And it’s also worth noting that all of this is predicated on an assumption that Alberta can achieve the many conditions included in the MOU, some of which are fairly difficult. Indeed, the nature of the MOU’s conditions has already led some to suggest that it’s window dressing for the federal government to avoid outright denying a west coast pipeline and instead shift the blame for failure to the Smith government.

Assuming Alberta can clear the MOU’s various hurdles and achieve the development of a west coast pipeline, it will certainly benefit the province and the country more broadly to diversify the export markets for one of our most important export products. However, the agreement is far from ideal and could impose much larger-than-needed costs on the economy if it leads to an oligopoly. At the very least we should be aware of these risks as we progress.

Jason Clemens

Executive Vice President, Fraser Institute

Elmira Aliakbari

Director, Natural Resource Studies, Fraser Institute

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A Christmas wish list for health-care reform

Published on December 23, 2025

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From the Fraser Institute

By Nadeem Esmail and Mackenzie Moir

It’s an exciting time in Canadian health-care policy. But even the slew of new reforms in Alberta only go part of the way to using all the policy tools employed by high performing universal health-care systems.

For 2026, for the sake of Canadian patients, let’s hope Alberta stays the path on changes to how hospitals are paid and allowing some private purchases of health care, and that other provinces start to catch up.

While Alberta’s new reforms were welcome news this year, it’s clear Canada’s health-care system continued to struggle. Canadians were reminded by our annual comparison of health care systems that they pay for one of the developed world’s most expensive universal health-care systems, yet have some of the fewest physicians and hospital beds, while waiting in some of the longest queues.

And speaking of queues, wait times across Canada for non-emergency care reached the second-highest level ever measured at 28.6 weeks from general practitioner referral to actual treatment. That’s more than triple the wait of the early 1990s despite decades of government promises and spending commitments. Other work found that at least 23,746 patients died while waiting for care, and nearly 1.3 million Canadians left our overcrowded emergency rooms without being treated.

At least one province has shown a genuine willingness to do something about these problems.

The Smith government in Alberta announced early in the year that it would move towards paying hospitals per-patient treated as opposed to a fixed annual budget, a policy approach that Quebec has been working on for years. Albertans will also soon be able purchase, at least in a limited way, some diagnostic and surgical services for themselves, which is again already possible in Quebec. Alberta has also gone a step further by allowing physicians to work in both public and private settings.

While controversial in Canada, these approaches simply mirror what is being done in all of the developed world’s top-performing universal health-care systems. Australia, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland all pay their hospitals per patient treated, and allow patients the opportunity to purchase care privately if they wish. They all also have better and faster universally accessible health care than Canada’s provinces provide, while spending a little more (Switzerland) or less (Australia, Germany, the Netherlands) than we do.

While these reforms are clearly a step in the right direction, there’s more to be done.

Even if we include Alberta’s reforms, these countries still do some very important things differently.

Critically, all of these countries expect patients to pay a small amount for their universally accessible services. The reasoning is straightforward: we all spend our own money more carefully than we spend someone else’s, and patients will make more informed decisions about when and where it’s best to access the health-care system when they have to pay a little out of pocket.

The evidence around this policy is clear—with appropriate safeguards to protect the very ill and exemptions for lower-income and other vulnerable populations, the demand for outpatient healthcare services falls, reducing delays and freeing up resources for others.

Charging patients even small amounts for care would of course violate the Canada Health Act, but it would also emulate the approach of 100 per cent of the developed world’s top-performing health-care systems. In this case, violating outdated federal policy means better universal health care for Canadians.

These top-performing countries also see the private sector and innovative entrepreneurs as partners in delivering universal health care. A relationship that is far different from the limited individual contracts some provinces have with private clinics and surgical centres to provide care in Canada. In these other countries, even full-service hospitals are operated by private providers. Importantly, partnering with innovative private providers, even hospitals, to deliver universal health care does not violate the Canada Health Act.

So, while Alberta has made strides this past year moving towards the well-established higher performance policy approach followed elsewhere, the Smith government remains at least a couple steps short of truly adopting a more Australian or European approach for health care. And other provinces have yet to even get to where Alberta will soon be.

Let’s hope in 2026 that Alberta keeps moving towards a truly world class universal health-care experience for patients, and that the other provinces catch up.