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Opinion: Crisis capitalism comes for Alberta’s classrooms

When governments stop managing crises and start manufacturing them, we enter the world of crisis capitalism — a political economy that treats social breakdown not as tragedy, but as opportunity.

The term, popularized by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine (2007), describes how crises — economic, environmental, or political — are used to push through changes that would otherwise face fierce resistance. The pattern is familiar: A system is destabilized, citizens are told it’s “broken,” and the solution arrives in the form of privatization, deregulation, or austerity. The public pays for the crisis, and private interests profit from its repair.

Opinion: Crisis capitalism comes for Alberta’s classrooms Back to video

Alberta’s confrontation with teachers fits that pattern uncomfortably well.

Nearly 90 per cent of the province’s 51,000 teachers recently rejected the government’s contract offer; thousands marched on the legislature Sunday. Their concerns are not abstract: Per-student funding is the lowest in Canada — about 16 per cent below the national average — and has fallen roughly 17 per cent in real terms over the past decade. Class sizes have ballooned, supports have been cut, and burnout is endemic, despite an $8.3-billion budget surplus.

Alberta’s teachers are hardly unreasonable. Their salaries are about 19 per cent below the level needed to maintain 2011 purchasing power. After years of stagnant wages and rising........

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