The refugee crisis is causing an economic crisis in Alberta schools. The Calgary Board of Education (CBE) is under serious financial strain caused by Federal and Provincial governments downloading the costs of educating the sudden influx of refugee children.

CBE is seeing costs exceeding $2.6 million this year for the costs of educating the more than 400 additional refugee students added to the school system since January. CBE Chair Joy Bowen-Eyre says these are costs the Federal and Provincial governments promised they would help the school boards absorb. Neither level of government has kept that promise so CBE is facing ballooning class sizes and budgetary “juggling”.

Who could have ever seen this coming? We did.

Back in November, we called for a refugee pause. Thousands of Canadians signed our Rebel petition at refugeepause.ca asking Trudeau to slow down his irresponsible plan to dump refugees into unprepared Canadian communities. Here we are, nearly eight months later, and our predictions about a crisis of services are happening. We don’t have a crystal ball. We have common sense.

Liberal Immigration Minister and Alberta NDP Seniors Minister Lori Sigurdson assured us all these refugees would have all the services they need. They never explained that the services would be poached from Alberta school board budgets.

Alberta students are going to have to do with less because of the Liberal’s campaign promises and the NDP’s virtue signalling.