Alberta still won’t join the federal pharmacare program.
Never mind Health Minister Adriana LaGrange’s explanation in her press release Friday – “the federal government has yet to share its vision for the future of national pharmacare,” yadda, yadda. That’s just a way to stall things until Pierre Poilievre can get himself elected prime minister and start dismantling the programs that bind the country together.
Pharmacare will be an excellent place to start because it won’t have been around long enough or benefitted enough people to generate much protest when it disappears again before Poilievre moves on to bigger and more destructive things.
The federal Pharmacare Act came into force on Friday. Alas, like many of the promises of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, too little was delivered too late.
Indeed, the Liberal lack of enthusiasm for pharmacare, at least until Jagmeet Singh’s NDP caucus in Parliament held their feet to the fire for a spell, was almost enough to make you wonder if there’s really all that much light between the Liberal neoliberals and the Conservative ones.
Vulnerable Canadians needing access to diabetic treatments and birth control would benefit quickly in huge numbers, but by restricting the first phase of the program to those things the federal government has made it easy for subsequent governments to eliminate. After that, it will be politically much harder to try again.
LaGrange’s news release was billed as a “statement,” presumably as a way to lend it some spurious gravitas. Albertans who follow the province’s politics will have noticed Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party has been issuing a lot of similarly branded statements lately.
Plus, if you’re in a hurry with a holiday weekend coming up, a statement also a great way to save the time it takes to figure out a news lead for a presser.
Alert readers will also notice that LaGrange said much the same thing back in February, complaining at that time that she wasn’t consulted before the federal Liberals closed the deal – as if she would have been happy to go along with it had that been the case. (Who says the UCP has no sense of humour?)
“Give us the dollars,” LaGrange said then. “Allow us to enhance the programs we actually have now, rather than create more bureaucracy.” That’s pretty rich coming from the minister responsible for replacing Alberta Health Services, the most cost-effective health care system in Canada, with four bloated bureaucracies! But, as with the Canada Pension Plan, the UCP always wants its cut.
As in the past, LaGrange spins a tale in which Alberta’s confusing, inadequate, and restricted public pharmaceutical and medical device programs should be the model for a national plan.
Well, look, as the premier says when she’s about to tell a whopper, the real reasons are pretty simple to figure out: The UCP is opposed to anything that will make (1) the federal Liberals look good (this is known here in Wild Rose Country as “owning the Libs”), (2) give citizens more reasons to value their Canadian citizenship, or (3) cut into corporate profits.
On all of those grounds, a national pharmacare program fails as far as the UCP is concerned, never mind the fact that it would benefit a large number of Canadians enormously.
No Conservative government, federal or provincial, regardless of the name under which it does business, will do anything that is simply designed to benefit Canadians or Albertans.
If there’s no grift, there’ll be no gift.
Premier promises: UCP’s Caucus Cookie Lady will never use that poop analogy again!
On her free CORUS Radio program yesterday, Premier Danielle Smith swiftly blew off a caller from Lacombe County unhappy about the welcome extended to Alberta’s notorious
Jennifer Johnson, by the UCP Caucus.
Johnson was until last week the “Independent” MLA for Lacombe-Poonoka who infamously compared trans children in school to “a teaspoon of poop in the cookie batch” just before the last Alberta general election, in which she was running as a UCP candidate.
It’s long been said in this space that the UCP would invite Johnson back as soon it could – and now that Conservatives know just how much they can get away with, it has.
“I do not believe that she has changed and I think that you are gonna lose us grass roots conservative voters because you are pandering, pandering to the views of the right-wing extremists in the party,” the woman caller, sounding very earnest, declaimed. “You’re gonna lose us!”
“Well, look,” the premier responded, “I mean, I think the analogy she used was disgusting and said so at the time. … She has demonstrated genuine remorse for the language that she used. She will never, ever, use that analogy ever again.” (Emphasis added.)
There was more gaslighting, but that’s about all I can stand to transcribe. Readers who are gluttons for punishment can listen for themselves to the clip kindly proHealth Minister Adriana LaGrange says Alberta still won’t join Ottawa’s pharmacare program vided by The Breakdown.
Albertans can rest assured, though, that in future all members of the UCP Caucus will find different, more coded metaphors to express their transphobia.
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