EDMONTON — Premier Danielle Smith announced this week that a feasible passenger rail network connecting downtown Calgary to its airport is "no longer just a vision, but a goal," unveiling a master plan that education advocates were quick to praise as the most thoroughly funded learning module in the province's history.

"For years we told students that a thing can be studied indefinitely without ever being completed, and they didn't believe us," said one Alberta Education official, gesturing at a 340-page feasibility report. "Now they have a primary source. This is experiential learning. This is a province modelling, in real time, the difference between announcing something and doing it."

The master plan, which commits the government to studying the rail line further before commissioning a study on whether to study it, has been hailed as a teachable moment for the roughly 1.4 million students currently learning in classrooms the province describes as "at capacity, conceptually."

"We're not building a train, exactly," a senior advisor clarified. "We're building a deeply educational document about the concept of one day building a train." Asked whether the money might instead go toward the 3,000 teachers the government has not hired, the advisor noted that a train, unlike a teacher, "cannot file a grievance."

School boards across the province said they were inspired by the plan's ambition and would be adopting its core methodology, under which any request for funding is met with a feasibility study, a press conference, and a renewed commitment to the vision. "We now tell parents their child's overcrowded grade four class is no longer just a problem," said one trustee. "It's a goal."

At press time, the province confirmed the airport rail line would be fully operational by an undisclosed future in which it has also addressed school capacity, surgical wait times, and the existence of municipalities, adding that all four projects were currently in the same exciting stage: described.