Q&A: Why Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s government imposed a teachers' contract

This fall, the Alberta government invoked the notwithstanding clause to force teachers back to work.

Premier Danielle Smith's United Conservative Party government used the constitutional provision to override teachers’ charter rights to end an impasse with locked out teachers.

The historic strike began Oct. 6 when 51,000 educators walked out of public, Catholic, and francophone schools across Alberta over wages and working conditions, which cancelled classes for an estimated 750,000 students.

In a year-end interview, CBC News asked the premier about government decisions during the contract dispute and where she sees public education heading in Alberta.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

With the Back School Act, the government imposed a contract on teachers that they had already voted to reject. They've lost the right to collectively bargain. They returned to classrooms where they said the conditions were unchanged. Many teachers say they feel the government doesn’t respect them. So, how do you feel about teachers?

Because I was a school trustee for the Calgary Board of Education, I believe in local governance and local decision making. When we first came into office, we were hearing from our school trustees about where some pressure points were.

When we got a first negotiated settlement with teachers earlier in the year, the breakdown of those opposed was 60 per cent to 40 per cent in favour. And then we added an additional $300 million to the proposal, and then we got further apart.

We were wondering what was going on there. Part of it was, perhaps, there was more work that needed to be done on complexity, on aggression in classrooms.

That's why we started our complexity task force. When we got the task force results back, we realized that there were certain decisions that you just couldn't make at the bargaining table.

It’s going to require us to do what we're doing now through the class size and complexity cabinet committee — a cross-ministry approach to address issues of mental health, addiction, aggression and behavioural issues.

And I hope that they'll see that as we start working through these issues of class size and complexity that we're serious about solving them.

Your government didn’t need to impose a four-year contract to get students back into classrooms, though. Why did you go that route?

We were very forthright about the amount of dollars that we had in our budget to put forward a package. It was $2.6 billion. And we've come to two negotiated agreements that were put to members. And then at the last minute, the teachers' association put something on the table that would have cost an additional $2 billion. We just can't do that.