Teachers have been shafted. Over the past ten years teacher salaries have been cut, cut, and cut again. Benefits have been shot. Pensions halved. New teachers are pushed from career-creating positions that build their skills and bring them the solid base that makes them better teachers to, sadly, year-long contracts that do not give them benefits nor protect them.

New teachers are doomed from the start, retiring teachers are forced to stay as substitute contractual teachers, and we’re harming students by losing those bright, willing people who chose a life of public service over other careers

Now Stelmach aims to have them accept a voluntary pay freeze. He’s going to be “very firm”. I’m pretty sure this means that the voluntary cut are not that voluntary.

Obviously, teachers are already mad. This is just one more spit in the face.

Although Stelmach argues it will save jobs, there’s still a problem. Klein promised that in the mid-1990s. For a five-percent cut there were, supposedly, not to be any job cuts. There were cuts anyways.

Just like Getty, and others, Stelmach and Klein have squandered the boom. Our heritage fund has been raided over and over, in a perfect juxtaposition to Norway’s fund that stores away 95% of all revenue from royalties. The conservatives haven’t done that.

Between 1989 and 1993 we gave more to businesses in the oil patch than we took in with royalties. Kevin Taft’s book, Shreading the Public Interest, deals with this. Although I haven’t look at the data in the last few years, I’m almost positive that Stelmach and Klein have been doing this too.

The royalties fiasco has also been a complete mess. It has been revisited almost ten times since last October. At the beginning of 2008 Stelmach predicted a surplus of several billion–we are now in a deficit of several billion. This is mismanagement of the highest order.

As a child of two teachers, and who is now in university, I find the situation being handed to me–the next generation–atrocious. Purely, and completely atrocious.

As the grandson of a rancher and reporter, who wrote about the environmental impact of the tar sands almost a century ago, it drives me nuts that we haven’t solved the environmental questions of today. Three generations have come and gone now, yet we do not have an answer.

This is driving me nuts. Someone tell me I’m not the only one.

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