Thank very much, President Henderson. I certainly appreciate the invitation to join you this morning, and the invitation to join you last night. I appreciated the opportunity to meet with so many of you and to have a chance to talk frankly about what's important to us in education.

It is a pleasure to be here with you today with my Parliamentary Assistant, the member for Edmonton-Decore, Janice Sarich. If you have any tough questions, Janice would be more than pleased to deal with them.

I'm also very pleased to be here when you are celebrating and recognizing three people who have made an immeasurable impact on education in Alberta. Earl Hjelter, Julius Buski and David King all richly deserve these honours... Congratulations to the three honorees — well deserved honours. It's always important, in my view, to recognize and say thank you to people who go above and beyond to make a strong contribution, and they certainly have.

It's so very important to have the opportunity to talk formally and informally with all of you. While I meet regularly with Carol and Gordon, it's valuable for me to have the opportunity to come here, and many other places in the provinces, to talk informally, as we did last night.

I think it's fair to say that the ATA, teachers and government have built an excellent relationship over the past three years. We've had our differences on occasion, but there is nothing surprising about that. What's most important is that despite of any differences, we've always put Alberta's children first, and focused on developing their passions and their potential. We have the same purpose: the future, it's why teachers; it's also why governments govern.

The past three years with the MOA in place have enabled us to move forward on a number of fronts. We've been able to focus on the future, on educational policy, and on teaching professionalism. Inspiring Education, Setting the Direction and many other projects have benefitted immeasurably from not being distracted by contract negotiations and other day to day issues. In the department, we've had the opportunity to do critically important work to ensure that we have an education system that will meet the demands not only of today, but into the future.

I am pleased to tell you that this work is bearing fruit. The report from the Inspiring Education task force will be released on June 2nd, and the Setting the Direction report and response will follow on June 11th. The work for design and implementation will continue from there. These two initiatives will make a big difference in how our students learn, how our teachers teach, and how our system supports both.

Transforming our education system so that it meets the needs of future students is critical to the future economic and social development of the province. It will provide a framework for us to focus on teaching excellence, curriculum, and yes, assessment.

To enable us to remain focused on this important work, I want to make sure that negotiations stay off the table — that we, yes, deal with the issues of the day, but we focus on the future. As you know, we have two more years left in the agreement, and there are challenges that come with that timeline.

I can assure you that government is absolutely committed to fully funding the agreement. However, it may take more than the time remaining in the agreement to do so.

I have asked school boards to help us "bridge finance," if you will, in that circumstance. I've made it very clear that we have a growing demographic — a growing student population — and we're going to need all of our teachers, and all of our graduates. I've asked school boards not to lay off teachers, and to run deficits if necessary. It's not open season on deficits by any stretch of the imagination. But they can work with us if they have to, borrowing from their operating surpluses, and providing the bridging we need to get through these tough fiscal times.

It's really no different from what we're doing on the provincial scale. We have a sustainability fund. There are many uses for that fund, but one of them — the most important — is to make sure that any changes in our financial circumstances don't create a wrenching in our communities. This year, we budgeted for about a $4.9 billion deficit. Over the course of the year, it went up to a $6.9 billion deficit based on projections. Now we're expecting it will be substantially lower than that. But the benefit that we have — that no other government in North America has — is a sustainability fund of $17 billion, which helps us to smooth that over so that we don't have to balance the budget in any one year and don't have to go into a long-term deficit.

That's the approach that I'm asking the school boards to help us with. They have about $400 million in operating reserves, and yes, they saved them for other purposes, no question about that. But just like we are having to postpone some of things we wanted to do, we are asking them to postpone some of the things they wanted to do, and focus on getting through this fiscal time frame.

I know some boards are contemplating layoffs, but I can assure you I am encouraging them in the strongest possible terms not to take this step — to look at what the long term requires. And in the longer term, over the next five years, we're going to need all of our teachers. Laying off teachers in the short term is an exercise in balancing the budget, but it does not meet the needs of students today, or into the future.

In my view, and I've been very clear about this with school boards across the province, both in general communication and in face-to-face meetings, we must retain all the highly skilled teachers that we have, and replace those that are retiring. Like most challenges in education, this is not one that can be resolved easily, or quickly.

Here are the facts as I see them.

I want to take a long term view. We have a growing population of students, and we will face a growing shortage of teachers by 2012-13 if we do not bring in young, new talent. And we need to learn from, and reap the benefits of, the teacher s who are retiring.

That said, Alberta's teachers have been the best paid of all the provinces for a number of years. When we made the five year agreement, our objective in using the Average Weekly Earnings measure was to make sure that teachers' salaries kept pace with increases in the rest of province. The sentiment was that people being paid from the public purse should neither lead nor lag other salary increases.

However, no one was expecting the kind of economic turmoil that we've been through over the past 18 months. With two substantial salary increases at a time when many Albertans have seen their income decrease, or indeed have lost their jobs, and many others struggling to make ends meet, I think it's fair to say that teachers have done very well.

Albertans' income, in fact, has gone down over the past two years, if personal income tax revenues are any indication.

Now don't get me wrong — that's not to say that teachers don't deserve to be well paid. They do, and in Alberta, they are.

The average teacher has a salary of $78,700, with additional benefits that puts total compensation at $85,000 — and those are old numbers. That puts them in the top ten per cent of earners in Canada.

When much of the investment in our education system presently goes to salaries, further salary increases are very expensive.

We've come through a period of time where we dealt with the issue about the Average Weekly Earnings Index. We had a disagreement about the interpretation, we went to arbitration, and the arbitration determined in favour of the Average Weekly Earnings Index that Statistics Canada has determined. And we will live with that. That's what arbitration is about — if you have a disagreement in a contract, you have a way of settling that disagreement. We've done that, and we have funded it.

And while we'll meet our obligations and commitments under the contract, our fiscal reality is that there is very little spare money in the provincial government's coffers. We are making choices, very very difficult choices, about how to allocate resources. Further salary increases after the next two years will put us in a fiscally untenable position based on the projections we have now.

The choice that will be forced on us will be either to have the same number of well-paid teachers, or fewer, better paid teachers. It serves no one's purpose to have fewer teachers. The ones who would suffer the most from having fewer teachers are the children.

So we have to work together to find a better way, a different way of doing it. That situation does not have to occur.

I believe that we've accomplished a great deal under the current agreement. When the current five year agreement ends, I have no interest in returning to counterproductive bickering and bargaining. I have every desire to see the collaboration and cooperation that we've been able to build continue, and I'm sure that you do too.

So with that in mind, I believe that we need to seek a renewed longer-term approach that continues the good work of the past two years well into the future?

How would we benefit from doing so?

We know that money only goes so far in making a teaching career — in fact, any career — worthwhile. A sense of engagement; a feeling of accomplishment; being valued as professionals; empowerment in the classroom, and the ability to continually upgrade and improve our skills and our knowledge all play a role in job satisfaction.

With great starting salaries, progressive salary increases, and excellent pensions, I think we've gone as far as we can with money.

A better paid teacher is not necessarily a better teacher.

What I'm really interested in is making sure that there's enough money to fund the things that really improve teaching effectiveness.

Teaching effectiveness is the key to student success. Increasing salaries will not help teachers meet the challenges of the 21st century classroom. An increase in salary will not create more hours in the day. It will not support applied research like AISI. It will not connect schools with community support services. And it will not provide meaningful, consistent, high-quality professional development.

I'm often reminded — not that I need to be reminded — that teachers are professionals — and that's absolutely true.

With significant numbers of teachers retiring in the coming years, we need to reap the benefits of their knowledge and wisdom. We need to move forward together, recognizing that teachers as professionals are the core of an excellent learning system.

I've had the opportunity to talk with education ministers from many parts of the world. I've had an opportunity to sit down with seven education ministers in Singapore last summer to discuss what makes an excellent education system. What makes the top twenty-five education systems the top twenty-five? And how do we keep ourselves there?

And it won't be surprising to you that regardless of the backdrop, if you will, regardless of the style of government, whether you're the Minister of Education from the People's Republic of China, or the Minister of Education from Hong Kong, or the Minister of Education from Sweden, or the Minister of Education from Alberta, there's agreement that excellence in teaching is the core of an excellent education system.

I know you'll find that shocking. But what does that mean for us? It means that if we want to continue to have one of the best education systems in the world, we need to continue to focus on excellence in teaching, first and foremost. It means that yes, we need to do work on curriculum, and yes of course we need to do work on assessment. But it's excellence in teaching — teaching professionalism — that's at the core.

That means we need to increase the value of teachers as professionals in our schools and our society. I've been doing my job around the province to talk about the value of teachers to our society and community. We need to do that because we want to attract the best and the brightest to be our teachers — and I'm sure from seeing this room that we're doing that.

We want our youth going through university to aspire to be teachers, first and foremost. We need our pre-service teaching education at our universities and colleges to make sure that pre-service education meets the needs of teachers as they come out into the profession. We need to ensure that teacher induction into the profession is done appropriately so that our first-year teachers get a good grounding and a good start on their professional career. We can't afford to lose a third of our teachers in the first five years of their practice.

And it means that we need to have ongoing professional development so that they can remain passionate throughout the 35 to 45 year teaching careers we want them to have.

And so we have lots of work to do. And we have work to do collaboratively — because professional development does not belong to any one stakeholder group. Certainly a teacher as a professional has their own personal obligation to their growth and development. The ATA as a profession certainly has an interest in making sure that teachers as professionals, and the teaching profession, remains current, relevant and leading edge. School boards, of course, have concerns about making sure that the particular needs of the students entrusted to them are met, and therefore that professional development meets the needs of teachers in their area. And of course the province has concerns for the system — that our system meets the needs of the students entrusted to it.

On a provincial basis, for example, there's a number of areas, including assessment, use of technology, First Nations and Metis education, and education of children with special needs. These are areas that have a system-wide concern, and a system-wide need.

As a result of Inspiring Education, we'll be making a number of changes that I hope you'll find both liberating and empowering, but also challenging.

And we'll need to continue to work collaboratively and cooperatively on those changes — to ensure we're not just one of the best education systems in the world today, but to continue to be the best education system in the future because our children need it.

If we're going to trade out into the world, if we're going to be global citizens, if we're going to be active in a knowledge-based world economy, our children have to have the best opportunities they can get to be the best that they can be.

We'll need to ensure that you as teachers are supported in that. This is not about asking you to do more work but it may be about how you do your work differently.

I want to be sure that teachers have all the supports they need to be able to do their jobs well. We can expect that teachers as professionals will differentiate their instruction for the students that are entrusted to their care. That's not new. What's increasingly difficult are the other issues that kids bring with them to school from the community — the drug problems, the alcohol problems, family violence problems, bullying issues. We need to be able to provide the supports for students that wraparound them, and extend through them, to their families, to put them in a position where they can be ready to learn.

So the focus going forward is not, in my view, about income and salaries. The focus going forward needs to be on those things that truly support and improve professional practice.

Times change, and our education system must change with them.

And as times change, ministers often change too. As Carol said, I've been in five ministries — I can't keep a job.

This is the time for all of us to come together while we have the opportunity, the focus, the relationships, to build into the future — to make the changes we need to see so that our children can have that opportunity to build into the future.

We can build on the professionalism and the professional practice of teachers so that we can have, as professionals, the value for what we do, both in our communities and through good salaries.

I know that you expect government to uphold its agreement with you, and we will.

But I also need your support to carry out the real work of that agreement, and that's going to take more than the next two years.

I can assure you that if you work with us on that, we will do our very best to ensure you have the supports you need to be the very best teachers you can be.

If we choose to work together, we can and will transform education in Alberta by always putting children first.

Thank you very much.

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