Are you wondering why Alberta Health Services would threaten nurses with layoffs in the middle of an international nurse shortage and a national health care crisis at the very moment the province’s governing United Conservative Party (UCP) is trying to reassure everyone things in health care are just copacetic?
Last night aboard the MV Spirit of Vancouver Island on the darkened waters of the Salish Sea, without even a glimmer of moonlight on the wintry swells, there was no illumination either.
The United Nurses of Alberta (UNA) reported in a news release that its director of labour relations received a letter Friday from the AHS director of labour relations warning there will be “reductions in positions within UNA’s AHS bargaining unit flowing from the movement of functions outside the organization.”
“AHS will also consider all options available to meet our organizational needs through this process, including changes to staff mix and service design, contracting out, changes or repurposing of sites or relocating, reducing or creasing provision of services,” the AHS letter also said. (Emphasis added.)
Members of the Alberta public should obviously be concerned by these possibilities as well.
UNA received a similar letter from the labour relations director of Covenant Health, the parallel publicly financed Roman Catholic health care system recently let out from under the thumb of AHS by Premier Danielle Smith’s government, and the second-largest health care employer in the province.
This, of course, is a reference to the UCP’s promised dismantling of AHS which, Smith, Health Minister Adriana LaGrange, and sundry MLAs, ministers and UCP flunkies have been reassuring us constantly will have no impact on the ever-improving level of health care they are determined to deliver from their hotel in Dubai or wherever the government’s brain trust is camped at any given time.
The letter was sent in the context of the union’s negotiations with the UCP government, with employer labour relations departments acting as its marionette, for a new collective agreement with AHS, Covenant Health and other major employers.
When Smith and LaGrange recently announced the plan to dismantle, disassemble, discombobulate, or whatever, the province-wide health authority created in 2008 and 2009, there were those who suspected there was actually no plan at all. But the government’s message to nurses, and their union, was not to worry.
But this official talk of position reductions, UNA said in a news release, “appears to contradict what Minister of Health Adriana LaGrange told UNA representatives in face-to-face meetings.”
It also mirrored, UNA noted in its release, the pre-pandemic behaviour of health care employers at the start of the last round of contract negotiations in 2019. The employers then “laid out an AHS plan to eliminate an ‘estimated’ 500 full-time equivalent Registered Nurse jobs over the following three years” – which would have resulted in job losses for at least 750 nurses in the union’s estimation at the time.
Friday’s letters, and the government’s bumbling response to the brouhaha that publication of them by UNA set off, certainly suggests that it’s actually true there either is no plan, or if there is one, no one is quite sure what it is.
Asked in the Legislature by Opposition Leader Rachel Notley just what the heck is going on, LaGrange’s response was confusing: “The letter that went from AHS to the nursing union was in fact to notify them that given the refocus because of our contractual obligations, and the fact that they are in a position to bargain as of December 2, that we needed to notify them that possibly some positions may move from AHS. They may shift, shift from AHS to the other organizations,” she burbled. “That’s all it was, Mr. Speaker.”
Read the letter, Notley advised the minister, and you’ll understand it’s about more than that. “In the midst of such a historical nursing crisis, which genius in the Premier’s Office thought that threatening the employment security of the nurses we do have is a good recruitment and retaining strategy?”
“We needed to notify the union that perhaps positions will shift from AHS to the other organization,” LaGrange responded. “But no decisions have been made. …”
Notley: “When will the UCP Government learn that nurses are an integral part of our health care system, and that we cannot keep them if we obviously repeatedly threatened to fire them?”
LaGrange: “Mr. Speaker, the letter was merely a contractual obligation.”
Notley: “That contractual obligation contradicts everything that minister just said.”
I have edited the transcript of the exchange to remove a lot of typical Question Period verbiage. Anyone who wants to read it word for word can consult Alberta Hansard today.
But the key points are covered. LaGrange has clearly memorized her talking points but doesn’t seem to truly understand what it going on – whatever it is, if anybody in the government even knows.
Perhaps the messaging will seem more plausible when Smith, an accomplished gaslighter, returns from Dubai.
In the meantime, we are left to consider a variety of possibilities. One is that there are actually several plans, and it is still to be determined which one will be carried out. Another could be that having no plan is actually part of the plan.
Regardless, the message to nurses, physicians and other health care professionals who may be choosing between Alberta and every other jurisdiction in North America that is short of medical professionals – which would be every jurisdiction in North America – is, wherever you go, don’t go to Alberta!
And as UNA noted in its news release: “According to the AHS website, there are more than 20 hospitals and health care centres currently reporting temporary service disruptions due to staff shortages, including the Fort Macleod Health Centre emergency department, which was temporarily closed on December 4 due to a shortage of nurses.”
Yet if you’re a nurse, nobody even knows who you’ll be working for, or whether or not you’ll have a job, a year from now!
Alberta’s health care recruiting program appears to be: Come to Alberta where we will immediately threaten to lay you off!
The province’s message to the nurses who are already here: Don’t worry, there’s no list, and you’re not on it.
Seriously, this is nuts! People who come up with stuff like this shouldn’t be running a peanut stand, let alone a health care system with more than 100,000 employees!
NOTE: In the interests of full disclosure, I am an employee of UNA. Also in the interests of full disclosure, when I wrote this, I really was aboard a large boat in the Salish Sea, getting my information haphazardly via smartphone. I am now somewhere with WiFi. Because I am on the road, metaphorically speaking, there will be fewer stories this week than readers are used to at AlbertaPolitics.ca. I will be back in Alberta soon.
Support rabble today!
We’re so glad you stopped by! Thanks for consuming rabble content this year.
rabble.ca is 100% reader and donor funded, so as an avid reader of our content, we hope you will consider gifting rabble with a donation during our summer fundraiser today.
Whether it be a one-time donation or a small monthly contribution, your support is critical to keep rabble writers producing the work you’ve come to rely on as a part of a healthy media diet.
Become a rabble rouser — donate to rabble.ca today.
Nick Seebruch, editor
