Alberta nurses rally for better wages and working conditions in Day of Action

Alberta nurses host information pickets in support for more safe staffing, patient care, and improvements to public health care. Tyler Barrow reports.

Nurses in Calgary and Edmonton joined in a province-wide Day of Action Saturday that took place at a variety of locations across the province.

Hundreds of nurses participated in the event in Calgary, which took place on the anniversary of the 1988 nurses’ strike, where more than 14,000 nurses walked off the job.

Union President of Local 211 Jacki Capper said the event was to raise awareness of the fact that, in 2025, nurses are fighting for the same issues that nurses walked out for in 1988: better working conditions and salaries.

“Here we are again, 37 years later, doing the same thing,” Capper said.

United Nurses of Alberta President Heather Smith said in an interview in Edmonton that the conditions in the province now echo the 80s.

“At the time we had a nursing shortage,” Smith said. “The employers came to the table at that time with massive rollbacks and so much of the 1988 strike was about defending what we had.

“This (Day of Action) is about not just asking again for respect, but saying we need to go forward,” she said. “We need to retain the nurses we have. We need the ability to recruit.

“And that comes back to what kind of compensation and supports are provided in this province for nurses.”

Capper said what might be different now is that there’s an existential threat to the notion of public-delivered health care in 2025.

“We are fighting for publicly-delivered health care and that’s very important,” Capper said, “because over time, over evidence, publicly delivered healthcare provides better outcomes and better bang for your buck.”

“Currently our employer is bringing in private agencies and bringing in nurses at three times our salaries,” she added, “and we are losing our nurses to those agencies, because they get paid more and get better working conditions.

“So why can’t we get paid that?”

Capper said nurses in her union are routinely being scheduled to work 16-hour shifts, which makes them sick and causes job burnout.

They’re also losing nurses to the same private agencies because they pay better and offer better working conditions.

Community nurse Edith-Rose Cairns said the nursing situation in the province is dire.

“I would sound the alarm at the highest level,” Cairns said. “ I want this government to listen to nurses. I want them to listen to people who work in the healthcare system and I want them to provide what is necessary for good quality healthcare in this province.”

Capper said the nurses union has formal mediation scheduled with the province for February, adding “but really unless government gives the employer a better monetary mandate, a strike is likely.”

Smith said nurses are angry.

“We are as close in many ways as we were in 1988 in terms of the anger and desire for nurses to see action and to take action,” she said. “So yes, there’s a whole lot of parallels and similarities.”

“We’ll know more at end of February,” Capper added.

Cairns said she worked 80 hours of overtime in the last two and a half weeks of December alone, and that overtime has become routine rather than the exception for Alberta nurses.

She said that’s no way to run a health-care system.

“I would just hope the public is behind us because we are here for them,” she said. “Nursing and healthcare worker conditions are patient care conditions.”

With files from CTV’s Tyler Barrow and CTV Edmonton