Labour experts dispute the claim by UCP Leader Jason Kenney that his party’s promise to stop workers being paid time-and-a-half for their banked overtime doesn’t amount to a cut in overtime pay.

Further, Kenney’s repeated insistence Monday that the change would simply align Alberta with overtime laws in “in every other province” is not true.

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In every province and territory where workers can bank overtime, employers are required to pay out those hours at 1.5 times the hourly wage. In B.C., it goes up to 2.0 for anything exceeding 12 hours of overtime.

“This does not affect overtime pay. I repeat — it does not affect or diminish overtime pay,” Kenney said Monday when asked about the line in the UCP platform which he unveiled over the weekend in Calgary.

Kenney argued that his promise to cut overtime payouts for banked hours would simply bring back rules that were in place for decades, but University of Saskatchewan political scientist Charles Smith told Postmedia that’s the crux of the issue.

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Until recently, he said, Alberta had the worst employment standards and union rules in the country.

He said the UCP overtime policy would see Alberta move back towards “an old model that never worked that well for workers to begin with,” because it would give employers “a way to defer wage costs.”

‘It would absolutely be a pay cut’

Alberta introduced a 1.5-time overtime system on Jan. 1, 2018, following consultations under the NDP government. When Labour Minister Christina Gray announced the employment standards review in March 2017, she said they hadn’t been overhauled in nearly 30 years and Alberta had fallen behind the rest of Canada.

Kenney dismissed a question about whether employers might force workers to bank overtime to avoid paying them out in cash, saying, “I never heard any complaints” about the previous law.

“There were no complaints about abusive practices by employers. There weren’t in the past, I’m sure there won’t be in the future,” Kenney said.

But a senior economist with the national branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Angella MacEwen, said Kenney’s policy is a head-scratcher.

“It would absolutely be a pay cut,” MacEwen said.

“I’m really surprised (about the election promise) given how many tradespeople are having a rough time right now. To tell them that you’re taking away their overtime pay, that’s shocking to me. I don’t think he talked to enough people who would be affected by this.”

The Alberta division of CUPE is registered as a third-party advertiser with Elections Alberta.

Kenney said Monday his policy was developed at the behest of hospitality workers who worried a lack of overtime would reduce their income from tips during busy times of the year like Christmas.

But the policy would affect a broad swath of workers, from trades to health care; basically anyone without a contract that specifically lays out overtime rules, MacEwen said.

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