According to the Minister of Health’s press secretary Steve Buick, there was “no error, and no undue delay” in the case of an 86-year-old Calgary woman who bled to death Sunday, June 5 after being mauled by three pit bulls that escaped from a neighbour’s yard into the alley behind her home.
Sure, there may have been a half hour wait for the ambulance to get there, but that was someone else’s fault.
Buick’s indignant tweets to that effect suggest nothing has really changed with the folks in charge of communications for the lame-duck Kenney government.
UCP social media “issues managers,” press secretaries, and their ilk have always seemed inappropriately aggressive in their responses to anyone who dared to criticize this government for any reason. This applied to ordinary citizens and political partisans alike. It was clearly part of Mr. Kenney’s policy of picking fights with everyone, and that in turn is a big part of why his own party turned on him as viciously as it did.
Still, the appalling death of the woman identified by neighbours as Betty Ann Williams – coming as it did in the midst of a crisis in the province’s ambulance system that has happened on the UCP’s watch and for which the UCP must shoulder responsibility – made it a powerful symbol of just how bad things have become.
Yet the circumstances are such that this is clearly one of those times when the best policy would be to humbly accept the blame and promise to get to the bottom of what happened and do better.
But that’s not the UCP style.
Buick told the CBC, in the words of the network’s report, that his boss, Health Minister Jason Copping, “was ‘relieved’ to hear that the AHS investigation confirmed there was no undue delay in the EMS response.”
Copping should have been appalled. You could almost hear Albertans all over the province muttering, WTF?
Responding to a tweet by the Health Sciences Association of Alberta, the union that represents most Alberta paramedics and EMTs, including those employed by Alberta Health Services, Buick said, “AHS now confirms there was no error, no undue delay.”
To HSAA’s point that the union is “fed up with grieving the failures of this system,” and its conclusion – which surely every reasonable person agrees with, regardless of their politics – that “EMS should be there when you need it.” Buick shot back: “This tweet and other comments have turned out to be grossly wrong. Over to you.”
HSAA wisely refused to rise to the bait.
Calgary Herald political columnist Don Braid, no ill-mannered firebrand, tweeted telegraphically that “AHS and Copping say ambulance response was fine because dog attack was first treated as a police matter. They should immediately release transcripts or recordings of calls to 911 dispatch.”
This is a plausible summation of what the minister and AHS said, and a completely reasonable conclusion about what should happen next.
Buick’s riposte to Braid: “‘Fine’? No one says it’s fine, this is shockingly unfair. AHS said the initial 911 call came to EMS via police as non life threatening. When EMS got info that it was life threatening, they were there in 9 mins. This is just too much politics, too much distortion. It’s wrong.”
This kind of response, needless to say, is not fine.
Judging by the reaction on social media, it certainly appeared to outrage almost everyone who read it, some of whom were pretty harsh. Many commented how profoundly unfair it was to the neighbour who tried to call the ambulance to be blamed for the slow response in this particularly shocking, but not untypical, case.
As a regular commenter on AlbertaPolitics.ca put it this week: “This is what we are now: a province of blame-shifters who attack good people who step in to help their fellow human beings in need.”
It’s hard to argue with Tony Clark, a former chief of staff to an NDP minister back in the day, when he said tweeted that “there needs to be an investigation into the response of the police and AHS.”
This, of course, is exactly what the UCP doesn’t want to happen, and is unlikely to permit.
“Buick is right here about too much politics and distortion,” Clark added in his tweet, with the qualification that the press secretary was “perhaps wrong about the source.”
“Cut through the spin,” Clark concluded. “Call in a third party to investigate. What happened was horrific and unacceptable.”
Whoever replaces Jason Kenney as United Conservative Party leader and Alberta’s top politician is going to want to put as much distance as possible as quickly as possible between their government and the former premier’s three years of misrule – one symptom of which is the slow-motion collapse of the provincial ambulance service we are all observing now with fear and horror.
For whomever replaces Mr. Kenney, this will present something of a challenge, of course. After all, misrule is defined quite differently by different groups of politically minded Albertans – those appalled by Kenney’s childishly optimistic approach to COVID-19, for example, and those who think he should have ignored the entire pandemic in the name of “freedom.”
Indeed, the UCP’s official reaction to Sunday’s tragedy is reminiscent of Premier Kenney’s famous response to the toll of COVID-19 in June 2020, when he blithely told the Legislature, “The average age of death from COVID in Alberta is 83, and I’ll remind the House that the average life expectancy in the province is 82.”
Former Progressive Conservative deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk responded at the time: “So, Alberta seniors, if you managed to live to 82 your shelf life is over. You can die.”
Kenney later tried to do a bit of damage control with radio talk show host Danielle Smith, now a candidate to replace him, telling her that that “I’m trying to, through the data and the facts, bring balance to the debate, to point out that we can safely re-engage in economic and social activity that is critical to our livelihoods and our lives together.”
Two years later, Albertans are still dying almost daily from COVID-19, although we’re paying far less attention now.
Still, surely one thing that most UCP leadership candidates could agree upon is the need to restore a civil tone to the government’s communications, especially its direct communications with citizens.
Indeed, you’d think the government would want to send a memo to that effect to its ministers’ press secretaries right now.
Unless they did, of course, and someone didn’t get the memo.
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