Had the United Conservative Party (UCP)’s John Middleton-Hope won Wednesday’s by-election in Lethbridge-West, one wonders if Health Minister Adriana LaGrange would have invited him along yesterday to help her make her long-overdue announcement of the government’s funding agreement with Alberta doctors?
Alas for the UCP, Middleton-Hope was not the winner of the by-election. The Alberta NDP’s Rob Miyashiro was, so Premier Danielle Smith had to satisfy herself by publishing a longish post on social media congratulating Middleton-Hope for losing the election.
There was nary of a word of congratulations for the winner, of course, but that’s how the UCP rolls. Alberta Conservatives are poor losers. But it’s always worth keeping in mind that, as Smith’s government illustrates daily, they’re worse winners!
Smith’s note congratulating the loser for his loss included this interesting phrase: “While we did not come away with a win, our candidate and the UCP gained a higher percentage of votes than we had earned in the 2023 General Election.”
Let’s pause for a moment to examine this bit of hyperbole:
On Wednesday, Middleton-Hope captured 44.9 per cent of the vote, an increase of a whopping 2.4 per cent over the 42.5-per-cent accumulated UCP candidate Cheryl Seaborn in the 2023 general election.
By this standard, the UCP would also be entitled to boast that Mr. Middleton-Hope’s tally also topped party standard-bearer Karri Flatla’s 44.3 per cent in the 2019 general election.
Another way to describe this phenomenon, of course, would be to say that no matter how many people vote in Lethbridge-West – 13,561 on Wednesday compared to 22,635 in the 2023 general election – the UCP just can’t seem to get past 45 per cent. There are about 37,000 eligible voters in the riding nowadays.
Indeed, the last time a Conservative candidate got more than that – 48 per cent – the winner was Progressive Conservative Clint Dunford, the premier was named Ralph Klein, and the year was 2001. Dunford passed away in 2021.
On Wednesday, Miyashiro, the winner, captured 53.4 per cent of the ballots cast, compared with the 53.9 per cent taken by former MLA Shannon Phillips in 2023 – so, a Conservative might argue, this was a percentage loss almost as huge as the increase posted by Middleton-Hope!
Pay deal for family docs is finally official – almost
Getting back to LaGrange’s announcement, the deal agreed to by the government and the Alberta Medical Association (AMA), which bargains collectively for the province’s physicians, will provide a new payment option to family docs who have a full-time practice with 500 or more patients. It is expected to increase pay for many physicians.
This may in fact make it a little easier to recruit more doctors to Alberta.
The big mystery that went unacknowledged in the government’s press release yesterday is why a deal has that was first announced by the government on April 17 has been sitting on a desk in the provincial Treasury Department for almost long enough to bring a baby to term while AMA leaders pleaded with the government to sign and implement what they’d agreed to.
“This agreement should have been done back in May when the premier promised it would be signed within a couple of weeks,” NDP Health Critic Sarah Hoffman remarked yesterday.
Speculation has been that the government didn’t want to reveal anything that might impact ongoing negotiations with other health care workers such as nurses, medical technologists and care aids, not to mention civil servants, municipal employees, schoolteachers and other education workers. An additional $250 million a year for physician compensation might well have an impact on their demands.
The agreement still hinges on the willingness of a minimum of 500 doctors to take part in the new funding formula, so while the deal is done, it’s not really a done deal just yet.
UCP claims Chief Actuary’s CPP pullout estimate is missing
According to a political aide to Finance Minister Nate Horner, a report by the Chief Actuary of Canada on the UCP’s scheme to pull Alberta out of the Canada Pension Plan is missing an estimate of how much the province would be entitled to get from the CPP’s huge investment fund.
“We received their interpretation of the legislation, but it did not contain a number or even a formula for calculating a number,” the CBC quoted press secretary Justin Brattinga saying yesterday.
Just a suggestion, but before we all freak out, perhaps someone should put in a call to the office of Chief Actuary Assia Billig to see what’s going on.
There has been, for one thing, some stuff taking place in Ottawa in the past few days related to federal government financing, and the finance minister who asked the Chief Actuary to deliver the report is no longer on the job.
Moreover, even without a need to replace a federal finance minister in a hurry and deliver a financial update, the week before Christmas seems like a peculiar time for the Chief Actuary’s estimate to have been expected by the province.
One thing that can be safely assumed is that with or without the Chief Actuary’s full report, the UCP’s estimate that Alberta, with about 11.5 per cent of Canada’s population, is owed 53 per cent of the CPP fund is both preposterous and obviously politically motivated.
Meanwhile, the UCP continues to refuse to provide any details of what the 94,000 Albertans who filled out the government’s flawed online survey last fall on replacing the CPP with an Alberta pension plan had to say. It’s not hard to guess why.
The Sovereignty Act: Sound and fury, signifying nothing
If you have time this holiday season, it would be well spent reading the latest post on the University of Calgary Law Faculty’s blog, in which Professor Emeritus Nigel Banks and Assistant Professor Martin Z. Olszynski examine the Smith Government’s use of its Sovereignty Act to try to try to derail the federal greenhouse gas emissions cap. With a Shakespearean flourish, they find the government’s legal strategy to be “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (The Tragedy of Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5, in case you missed the performance.)
“Such motions, even when implemented, can do nothing to better the legal position of the province when faced with federal statutes and regulations with which it does not agree,” the authors conclude. “This is indeed political theatre.”
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