by: don braid
it takes a special government to praise nurses for their work during the greatest health crisis in a century, and then offer them a three-per-cent pay cut.
this makes the ucp look heartless. by comparison, their treatment of doctors seems almost humanitarian.
the united nurses of alberta, with more than 30,000 members, is a much more powerful body than the doctor’s group, the alberta medical association.
and many nurses are talking about a strike.
“i’m not raising that word — it’s the members who are raising it,” says una president heather smith.
“the mood is definitely very tense. and last week does not in any way help to de-escalate an exhausted workforce who already feel under-appreciated and disrespected.”
last tuesday, government negotiators formally proposed a three-per-cent pay cut over one year. the union says that with other government demands, this amounts to a real-world cut of more than five per cent.
the government has always signalled that after the pandemic, it would turn to the province’s serious fiscal problems, which include a $16-billion deficit and nearly $100 billion in debt.
premier jason kenney often admiringly cites premier ralph klein’s cuts in the 1990s, which were more severe.