It was an interesting strategy for Premier Danielle Smith’s government to trot out former premier Ed Stelmach, the man most associated with the creation of Alberta Health Services (AHS) back in 2009, to act as a validator at the announcement of her plan to smash the province-wide health care agency to smithereens.
It’s impossible to say if Stelmach was always part of the roll-out plan or if he was a last-minute addition to try to counter the fact the NDP Opposition got its hands on a leaked copy of the United Conservative Party (UCP) cabinet’s briefing notes on the plan to deconstruct AHS and boldly pulled the rug out from under the government by announcing it first.
This was both a scoop and a coup for the NDP, allowing the Opposition to set the narrative in a way that will be very hard for the government to overcome – even with Mr. Stelmach, known by some as Steady Eddie in his political heyday, temporarily back on the ever-more-unsteady Conservative team.
It was also a dramatic reversal from the inexplicably passive willingness of the Opposition party during last spring’s election campaign to repeatedly allow the UCP to set the agenda on issues that should have been liabilities to the government. One can’t help but wonder if some of those new NDP MLAs are pushing a more aggressive and effective communications strategy.
Thanks to the NDP successfully foiling the government’s plan to announce the deconstruction of AHS just before the Legislature shut down for a week, it’s going to be pretty hard to get the public to forget the Opposition’s assertion that spending billions to break up AHS after spending a similar amount and a decade and a half of turmoil to create it is only going to make the crisis in the province’s health care system worse.
Likewise, it’ll be difficult for the government to persuade anyone now that the whole scheme isn’t intended to sow chaos in a health system on the brink of collapse as a precursor to massive privatization.
Given the NDP’s revelations, it sure doesn’t feel reassuring to learn that the new chair of the new AHS board, Lyle Oberg (another mummified former Conservative cabinet minister who long ago pledged allegiance to Premier Smith), has post-political experience setting up private hospitals, or that the new board will have “one or two members with experience on mergers and acquisitions,” as the leaked briefing slide deck says.
Anyway, Mr. Stelmach’s endorsement didn’t sound all that stirring.
“A lot has happened since I think it was May of 2008 when we made the announcement” Alberta would consolidate all hearth care services into AHS, he said in part, citing the homelessness and addiction crisis. “But I’m fully supportive of the plan that was introduced today,” he responded to a question by Calgary Sun columnist Rick Bell. “We’re very optimistic that we will see positive results.”
Regular readers of this blog will know that I hold Stelmach in high regard. I found his answer unpersuasive, though, and I am sure he felt constrained in what he could say by his role as chair of the Board of Covenant Health, the operator of Catholic hospitals that depends on the government both for funding and independence.
Stelmach’s full answer can be heard starting at about 40:30 on the government’s video of the news conference.
Of course, the principal reason Stelmach’s contribution will have little impact on the government’s unexpected public relations problem is that Albertans have short political memories, and I doubt that many members of the audience Premier Smith is trying to reach remember him very well, if at all. The same goes for Dr. Oberg.
The early release of the briefing notes by the NDP seems to have forced the government to move up its press conference by a day to try to recover lost ground.
Leastways, until yesterday morning the government’s “Refocusing health care in Alberta” page showed yesterday’s newser scheduled for today – which would have ended the Legislature’s working week with the government’s talking points fresh in the minds of the public, and with no sittings of the Legislature next week at which the Opposition could ask embarrassing questions.
By the time MLAs got back to work, the announcement would have been old news, and the UCP would have given us new things to get agitated about, no doubt.
Early versions of the backgrounder published yesterday by the government also showed signs of a hasty cut-and-paste job from the briefing slides, cleaned up later in the day.
The NDP also held another news conference yesterday, to hammer home its message, in the words of Opposition Health Critic David Shepherd, that “what Danielle Smith described this morning will make health care slower and harder to find and more fragmented.”
During the NDP newser, Registered Nurse Anahi Johnson said, “no health care worker I know would recommend millions of dollars be spent on additional layers of bureaucracy and to eliminate public delivery of services, compromising the care of all Albertans.”
“We need better staffing, which requires respect for health care workers, and initiatives to retain, recruit, and return health care professionals to the public health care system,” she said.
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