Last year's thankfully abandoned plan to close Alberta Hospital Edmonton, the Alberta capital's world-class psychiatric facility, was touted by its advocates in Alberta Health Services and the provincial health ministry as a money saver.

This claim smacked of baloney from the get-go -- at least if you assumed that AHS, Alberta's single province-wide health "superboard," actually meant what it said when it promised to provide equivalent or better mental health services "in the community." After all, community services don’t come that much cheaper than institutional care, and critics were quick to point out that not a single acute-care psychiatric bed existed anywhere in the region but at Alberta Hospital.