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What Do Three Provincial Elections Mean for Canadian Education?

With three provincial elections in the bag, the Nova Scotia Tory premier Tim Houston, has called a fourth for November 26, A lot has been up for grabs in Canadian K12 education and most of post secondary as well. First we had the BC cliff hanger leading to an inherently unstable NDP Green cohabitation of some sort even though the NDP has a bare majority. Next the NB Liberals tossed a very right wing Higgs Tory government on the ash heap, Finally we had the SK election where the NDP made a valiant charge but came up a few seats short.. Chronologically, we can run through the politics of each and the implications for the K12 education system.

The BC Cliffhanger.

Since the 1930s and the creation of the CCF, (later NDP). In BC, based originally on loggers and miners unions, politics took a polarized, left vs right configuration, with really only 2 political formations - the NDP on the left side and various right of center formations, oriented to keep the NDP out, on the other side. These groups have been, at various times, Liberals and Conservatives, a Liberal-Conservative coalition, Social Credit, BC Liberals, BC United and now BC Conservatives. Originally they were oriented to support the resource ownership groups, but later real estate and other urban business groups, sometimes called Howe St interests (like Bay St Toronto) have joined the club. Their prime political directives are anti union and anti NDP.

I’m sure BC followers are well aware of all the BC United to BC Conservative drama, If not check the link at the very end of the piece. There is a sense in BC that the NDP lost support in the recent election. They did lose a couple percentage points, but actually gained votes, to their second highest vote ever. The real story is the right wing finally consolidated their vote behind one party. It may be that the Greens have lost votes to the NDP while the growth in population and total vote has helped the Conservatives. Third terms are notoriously difficult to win in Canadian politics, and this was the BC NDP’s first threepeat. Eby did well in debate by admitting shortcomings and appeared to be a committed guy who was, at least trying. Rustad is obviously charismatically challenged, had an awfully robotic debate and was managing a shambolic merger of 2 parties. As politics polarized, it was hard on 3rd parties and the Greens paid a price for that.

As it stands, the BC education system has dodged a bullet. The BCCP planned to reinstate testing in grades 10 and 12. These tests have no positive effects since all educators know that they only really measure parent’s income, they are demoralizing for the marginal students, useless to educators and expensive with no redeeming features. BCCP reintroducing letter grades makes a bit more sense. The NDP should be careful messing with things parents understand and replacing it with meaningless eduspeak that alienates parents and hurts the system. Eby should return to letter grades and scrap the The new “proficiency” scale of “emerging, developing, proficient, and extending” which is ridiculous and meaningless to parents. If you don’t want parent alienation, ditch this. The BCCP wanted to end the SOGI guides and resources, so we have been spared that travesty for a few years. The NDP says the BCCP plan to eliminate portibles without increased funding can only be done with increased class sizes.

The scariest proposition from the BCCP is a series of hints that privatization would be increased for charter or voucher schools, in the Alberta style. The infamous far right group Take Back Alberta TBA, was active in BC during the election with advice and support. Looks

like we can avoid this disaster as well, for now. BC already partially funds private schools, and the NDP should have phased this out years ago.

The right in BC has consolidated. It's time for the progressive, left of center squad to do the same. Our free advice for Premier Eby would be first, offer the Greens two cabinet seats in a formal coalition, Secondly, legislate Ranked Voting or an electoral pact along the lines of NDP will not run in these 5 seats if Greens will not run in these 10 seats.

One final shot - a polling outfit known as Mainstreet Research, consistently got the results wrong and contributed the greatest number of polls, similar to the Nanos rolling polls. Mainstreet not only consistently put the Tories ahead on his own polling, but also skewed the polling aggregators like 338 Canada. Mainstreet always has the NDP lower than any other pollster. This is either malicious or they have a significant flaw in their assumptions. It's time to disregard Mainstreet in polling aggregations. Major media should stop taking them seriously.

New Brunswick turns sharply to the center.

Well, well, well, the pundits predicted the Liberals might just squeeze this out by a seat or two. They were not expecting them to blow the doors off an increasingly unpopular, socially conservative, Blaine Higgs Tory government. To add insults to injury, Higgs lost his own seat, later formally resigning as leader. Higgs wandered into the culture wars fighting over kid’s pronouns”, and managed to split his own party. People didn't like it for two reasons, every minute you are not spending on healthcare and cost of living is seen as wasted time, we have no time for this bullshit. Secondly, no matter how you feel about pronouns, it was seen by many as “punching down” on vulnerable kids - cruel.

The Liberals won 31 seats to the PCs 16, and the Greens won 2 seats. Where is the NDP you might wonder? Basically, unlike western Canada, Ontario, even NS and NL, the NDP is close to nonexistent in NB. Part of this is tradition, a polarized French vs English voting pattern, a left tilt to the Liberals to occupy the left of center political

space, and the emergence of the Greens as a progressive protest vehicle. Holt, the new Liberal leader, won the debate easily and made Higgs look small. She was seen to have the right priorities.

https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/JNBS/article/view/31425/188252664

As far as education is concerned, Higgs just seriously underfunded the public education in classic right wing style, based on the long held Tory thesis, that public education is an expensive undertaking best trimmed to the bone to avoid tax increases, the k

kryptonite of the conservative mentality. No matter they are not meeting staffing needs, substitute teachers are in short supply, and hard to teach kids with various disabilities are simply sent home. Currently there are 344 kids on “suspension”.

Higgs tried to make political hay over a trans kids, which obviously blew up in his face, due to the good sense of NB voters. As leaflets circulated accusing teachers of mass abuse of students, the Liberals and Greens condemned it, Higgs refused.

On the big one, privatization, Higgs was mainly aimed at healthcare, but he attempted to privatize school bussing. The instinct to privatize was there.

Saskatchewan Election : So Near and Yet So Far.

Much like the BC election, the winner was chastened by lost seats, and the loser was ecstatic due to major gains.The NDP jumped up 14 seats from 2020, swept Regina, almost swept Saskatoon, won both northern, largely indiginous, seats but failed to win the other smaller urban areas like Prince Albert and Moose Jaw. The conservative Saskatchewan Party SKP, lost 11 seats and almost all they did win were rural seats.

The pollsters were way off here predicting an almost even contest. Carla Beck’s leadership is being given significant credit in both debate performance, and issue management. The teachers’ strike damaged the SKP credibility in the big cities. Leaders often fail to get this. They see themselves crusading against unreasonable greedy unions, but much of the population sees it as mismanagement by the leaders, causing unnecessary chaos in family life. It looks like incompetence.

Other parties were the Saskatchewan United Party SUP, an even further right party who received 17 899 votes (4%) and the Green Party received 7853 votes and 2%.

The results for the two major parties both indicate an element of failure. Although SKP will be the government, their total failure in urban SK is a sign of decay. Cities get larger every year and rural areas get relatively smaller. For the NDP the failure in rural SK constitutes an equal but opposite problem. In every province, education is the second largest spending ministry, and probably the second biggest issue.

The issues in SK education give us a laundry list of neglect and contempt for public education. Notwithstanding its oil wealth, SK is 8th in per capita funding for education, way below the national median. Even so, their increase in funding in the last 5 years is up 79% for private schools and 13% for public education, a form of privatization by 1000 cuts.

Labour relations with teachers and support staff are poisonous. There is a chronic teacher shortage and violence in schools is a key issue. The teachers want smaller classes with fewer high needs students per class. The province is highly resistant to even negotiating these. The student population is 20% poor kids, often this is the real cause of other problems.The cutbacks in recent years are mainly directed to psychologists and social workers, akin to laying off the fire department during a wildfire. Compared to other provinces, SK ranks near the bottom on international test scores.

Overall, SK is in really bad shape educationally, yet the SKP Premier wants to pick a fight over “public school change rooms” promising to assign students to change rooms by their gender at birth. This is the conservative way of showing “action” without spending money to mitigate the real problems. Maybe with a powerful NDP opposition in the legislature, they can be shamed, cajoled, or frightened into doing the right thing.

Takeaways Across Three Elections

Reforming schools has its place, but you actually have to spend money to build the school systems people want, Smaller classes, fewer behavioral problems per class, get rid of portable classrooms, everybody hates them, even the new ones look like refugee camps. If you have a teacher shortage, pay more until you don't. As the old adage goes, “education is expensive, ignorance is a lot more expensive”
This one is mainly for David Eby. John Horgan had exactly the right image for the NDP, “ John looked comfortable in a saw mill” as podcaster David Herle quipped. His working class roots shone through. You don’t have that advantage. Eby looks like he belongs at UBC, not in a working class setting. People see your policy as “elite consensus”. This is deadly. You need a lot more populism and a lot less elite consensus. Small case in point. Removing letter grades from report cards. I strongly doubt that this is what blue collar parents want. Then don’t do it. The American Democrats should be hitting 60% of the vote but engaging in the culture wars has cost them 2 Teamsters for every SJW. Don’t take the bait on every issue.
Find out why you lost Surrey and Richmond. I suspect they have radically less tolerance for drugs and homelessness. Clean up Hastings Ave, Main to Yaletown, permanently.
Clearly, attacking trans kids and pronouns did not work for conservatives across the country. People care about healthcare, the cost of living, education, housing, and not culture war issues.
SK and BC NDPers, and NB Liberals, get a plan for smaller cities. Think in terms of “class based” issues. The great working class contains all genders, races, cultures and sexual orientations.

A very strong, but well intentioned critique appeared in Jacobin Magazine. In a nutshell, the author explains that the BC NDP places far too much emphasis on the views of the MANGOs (media, academics, and non government organizations) and far too little on the opinions of the loggers and miners who founded the CCF-NDP and the unions that represent them. We don't agree with every point, but the author makes a very strong case.

https://jacobin.com/2024/10/social-democracy-workers-ndp-election