April 16th: Update to Membership
It’s Not an Either-Or Situation between Trades and Tech
Over the weekend, the opinion article that I co-wrote with Dan O’Donnell, CAFA President, was published by the Calgary Herald. I’m sharing an excerpt here, and you can read the full article on the Herald’s website.
We need both mechanics and tech entrepreneurs, shopkeepers and teachers, librarians and short-order cooks, farmers, and gallery owners. The benefit of living in the country’s richest province should be that we don’t, as a society, have to choose whether we pay the mortgage or buy groceries, add to our savings account, or make a car payment. Managing wealth requires different skills than avoiding bankruptcy. It is about building for tomorrow and finding ways to ensure we maintain the standard of living we are used to. That means finding ways of promoting the trades while maintaining our world-class system of public universities and colleges.
Unless, of course, you are in the Alberta government. There, like the false choice between resource extraction and renewable energy, the fact that we need skilled trades must mean we do not need university graduates. And if we need private career colleges, we must not need non-profit colleges and universities.
That’s presumably why they have increased funding that goes to the office concerned with Alberta’s for-profit private career colleges by almost 25 per cent, while reducing the amount that goes to our province’s public universities by more than the same amount over the past four years. Alberta universities and colleges have fallen from among the best-funded in the country to nearly tied with Ontario for the worst.
In solidarity,
Blair Howes
SAFA President
ACIFA President