Inspired by a new weight-loss procedure at Edmonton's Royal Alexandra Hospital — in which the stomach is stitched smaller from the inside, with no external incision — Alberta's Ministry of Education has announced a revolutionary funding model that shrinks the public school system entirely from within, leaving the outside looking exactly the same.

"Traditionally, when you wanted a smaller education system, you had to go in with a scalpel — close a school, fire a teacher, hold a town hall where people yell at you," said a ministry official, gesturing at a diagram. "Those incisions leave scars. Voters remember scars. Our new approach goes in through the throat, so to speak, and quietly tightens everything from the inside."

Under the procedure, per-student funding is endoscopically stitched smaller while the headline budget number is left fully intact and even allowed to grow slightly, accounting for the 40,000 new students who will simply be absorbed into existing classrooms through what officials describe as "natural compression." There's no incision, no scar, and crucially, no press conference where anyone has to stand at a podium and say the word 'cuts.'

Early results are being hailed as a game-changer. One Calgary high school reported that its course catalogue had been reduced by a third overnight, yet from the parking lot the building appeared completely unchanged. "You'd never know anything was removed," said a recovering vice-principal, who noted that the music program, the librarian, and two spare classrooms had all been sleeved internally and were now stored as a single shared space. "It's minimally invasive. The community barely felt a thing until report cards came out."

The Ministry stressed that the technique is fully reversible should funding ever return, though it cautioned that, as with the medical version, results depend heavily on the patient making no further demands and learning to feel full on a fraction of what it used to take. Teachers seeking the procedure are advised it requires no consent form, as it has already been performed.

Asked whether endoscopically shrinking the school system from the inside might have long-term consequences, the official paused. "Look, the patient is lighter, the optics are clean, and nobody can point to a wound," they said. "In this province, that's what we call a healthy outcome."