On a wing and a prayer

UCP’s latest school building fumble

Camrose is one of the lucky few communities that got a new high school, not just designed but actually built, by the UCP. Blessed Carlos Acutis High School was set to open this fall, but there’s a big problem. It turns out, there’s no road access to the school and no site servicing for utilities.

How did this happen?

Well, it turns out that the UCP took it on faith that the municipality of Camrose and the land developer had worked out the details on road accessibility. It’s not lost on me that this faith-based school was built on…faith. Their faith turned out to be misplaced, and Camrose and the developer still have not come to an agreement about who bears the responsibility to build the needed road. Without road access and site servicing, the Alberta government can’t hand over the keys to the school board so the school will sit empty.

Mistakes happen. I get that. Sometimes I ask for pepper jack cheese at Subway and they just put regular white cheese on my sandwich. It’s not something to make a fuss about because my sandwich isn’t a $40 million piece of infrastructure.

The UCP have promised us a generational investment in building new schools. It’s not enough to promise those schools though. The UCP needs to show Albertans that they can fulfill the promise. Schools in Alberta are in a real crisis, today. Entire school divisions are FULL. There is not enough physical space to accommodate Alberta’s kids. So, when something goes wrong with one of the few school projects that moves to completion, we should be asking questions.

How did this happen? How is the issue being resolved? What will the government do differently in the future to prevent this same thing happening again?

The government promised that in the future, documentation will need to be provided to prove site ownership (the UCP didn’t even know who the owner was of this school site) and responsibility for site servicing. No more risking it on a wing a prayer. Though how was that ever their standard? To take the site readiness of a school plot on faith?

This incompetence is going to cost the Alberta taxpayers around a million dollars. The city is responsible for bearing those costs, but of course the government wants to move on quickly from this embarrassment. I suspect they will quietly pay for the road so the school can open as planned in the fall.

But as for the promises to build dozens of new schools across Alberta, I think we’ll have to keep a sharp eye on how many schools they manage to open. It’s a lot of schools after all, and this isn’t their first blunder.

cover photo credit- Global News Edmonton, Apr 2025.