It’s a shocker! But it turns out there is no crisis at Alberta Health Services (AHS)!
No need to take my word for this. It comes straight from the lips of John Cowell, the sole Administrator appointed by Premier Danielle Smith back on November 17 to replace the 11-member AHS Board.
Here are Cowell’s exact words, delivered Monday during a news conference about what the government calls its 90-day “health care action plan” update, delivered only 102 days after the Official Administrator was called out of retirement:
“When I started at Alberta Health Services in November, I was told that this was a system in crisis and a broken organization, and I didn’t really know what to expect. I am here today, however, to tell you that AHS is not in crisis and is not broken.”
So who told Cowell and the rest of us that AHS was broken and required the biggest of big fixes to survive?
Why, Danielle Smith, of course. The Danielle Smith, that is, who ran to lead the United Conservative Party (UCP) and inherited the keys to the office of the premier of Alberta when she emerged the winner.
After winning, for a long time, Smith continued to say the same things about AHS quite forcefully.
Well, that was then. This was one day before the UCP’s do-or-die pre-election budget, the one the Opposition NDP has been cheekily calling Premier Smith’s first and last budget.
As for whether or not the health care system is still in crisis, the government’s statistic-packed news release claiming reductions in some wait times are the result of UCP policy changes and Cowell’s even wordier backgrounder notwithstanding, you should really talk to some of Alberta’s front-line nurses, physicians and other health care workers before you make up your mind.
Most of them will undoubtedly tell you that the system remains in crisis, the result of years of chronic underfunding and intentional understaffing that will not be solved by Cowell’s promise to move 114 full-time nursing staff into the province’s Emergency Departments.
Since a worldwide shortage of nurses is bedevilling health care systems literally everywhere on the planet, one suspects these nurses are going to have to be drawn from elsewhere in AHS, robbing Peter to pay Paul, as the expression goes.
As for the Opposition NDP, it took the side of the health care professionals. “There is a crisis in public health care and it has been exacerbated by this UCP government,” said NDP Seniors and Housing Critic Lori Sigurdson, who noted that on Monday 32 hospitals were partly closed in Alberta because of staffing shortages.
“The truth is the UCP has starved and attacked our health care in Alberta for almost four years and the progress they are claiming in emergency rooms is largely due to the seasonal retreat of respiratory illnesses,” Sigurdson said.
As for the reporters at the news conference – which was just a small part of the Smith Government’s recent frantic effort to look busy with health care, management of which most voters view as an NDP strength – some were clearly skeptical about the claims made by Cowell, Smith and Health Minister Jason Copping at the news conference.
“You were elected in part as leader of the UCP and premier because you were a critic of how the health care system was operating and you were a critic of Alberta Health Services, and a very vocal critic,” said Postmedia’s Rick Bell, noting that “I’ve sat through news conferences like this since the beginning of time. Except no one here is eating a cookie, this time.”
So, he asked the premier: “How do you assure Albertans that this is not just one of the many health care transformation press conferences that have gone on … since I can remember, at least 32 years?”
In response, Smith blamed health care professionals for insisting that the system “was on the brink of collapse.”
“This is the language that was being used,” she complained. “It was in crisis. It was going to collapse. So when I came in, we absolutely had to take immediate action. … You heard Dr. Cowell today. The system’s not in crisis. It’s not going to collapse. …
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“People now have confidence and I think that they have confidence in the senior executive team, because the senior executive team has been supported by Dr. Cowell. Dr. Cowell’s been supported by both Mr. Copping and myself. And that was the immediate goal.”
Hmmmm.
Smith also spoke at her newser about the need to keep Alberta’s hospitals functioning in case there is another surge of COVID-19 – an observation that, while true enough, is not likely to please the UCP’s anti-vaccination base, which views COVID as a dark conspiracy to rob us of our freedom, not an actual disease that continues to kill people.
Many readers will recall Smith herself making conspiratorial vaccine-skeptical statements not so long ago.
Nor can the party base be too pleased with Smith’s capitulation to the health care deal offered by the federal government, led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is habitually reviled by Alberta Conservatives. The 10-year tentative agreement even includes a plan to share health care information – the topic of another conspiracy theory popular among UCP supporters.
But, to paraphrase Dr. Johnson, an election in 90 days concentrates a premier’s mind wonderfully.
Which brings us back to today’s budget, at which Alberta’s party of austerity will be promising to spend the province’s for-the-moment-bountiful resource royalties as if cabinet were made up of drunken sailors and money itself were going out of style.
It should also remind us to be wary of Premier Smith’s newfound caution with words.
It’s almost as if someone sat her down during her recent vacation and told her forcefully that that if she keeps talking about health care user fees, a provincial police force, an Alberta pension severed from the Canada Pension Plan, and that massive RStar well-cleanup boondoggle, she’ll be writing a guaranteed ticket to a second NDP Government led by Rachel Notley.
But if you’re paying attention, you’ll also note that Smith is not renouncing those controversial ideas, only staying mum about them.
So it’s reasonable to assume she hasn’t really changed her mind at all since the day, for example, that she said we should make $5 billion in cuts to health care and impose a provincial sales tax.
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