The United Conservative Party (UCP)’s knee-jerk vow to opt out of the national pharmacare program agreed to by the Liberal and NDP caucuses in Parliament last week is encountering stiff headwinds from an unexpected point of the political compass.
The Edmonton and Calgary Chambers of Commerce issued a joint press release urging Premier Danielle Smith and her government to quit already with their petulant response to a program that could save Alberta businesses big money and help the provincial economy.
“With the ongoing labour shortage and need to attract talent, and the cost to employers for providing health-related benefits, along with the financial benefit of pooling resources across provinces, a national pharmacare program, if developed well, could benefit Alberta’s economy,” the two business groups said.
Behind the scenes, I expect, the phone lines from executive suites to the UCP were burning up, and the messages had a sharper tone. Something requiring fewer parenthetical clauses, perhaps, more along the lines of, Knock it off, ya jerks! Now!
Chambers of commerce are normally pretty influential with conservative governments. But the UCP is a different kind of conservative government entirely, and it will be interesting to see if they pay any more heed to the business crowd than they do to any of their other critics.
“While more details are required to better understand the implications and potential benefits of a national program, we encourage the Alberta government to evaluate its feasibility and work with the federal government to explore whether it meets the needs of Albertans,” the chambers said politely, and quite reasonably.
“Given the persistent labour shortage in Alberta, we need every advantage to remain a magnet for talent,” explained the Calgary Chamber’s president, Deborah Yedlin, whose PR boffins were obviously making an effort to have her sound both polite and firm. “We cannot limit our ability to attract and retain the labour force we need.”
“If people – including staff, entrepreneurs, and consumers – are not well supported, our economy can’t fire on all cylinders,” said the Edmonton Chamber’s president, Doug Griffiths, a former municipal affairs minister in Alison Redford’s Progressive Conservative government. “We’ve learned this in spades over the past few years.”
Griffiths, who ran for the leadership of the PC Party in 2011, once wrote a book called 13 Ways to Kill Your Community, which was supposed to tell rural Alberta communities how not to kill themselves, economically speaking.
Rule No. 1 in Griffiths’ book was “the first of the 13 Ways to ensure the failure of your community is to forget the importance of water,” which shows, if nothing else, that he’s out of sync with the current Alberta Conservative government, which apparently has never seen a wasteful use for water it didn’t love, especially if fossil fuels are involved.
Indeed, Griffiths may want to revise his opus to offer a 14th way to kill your community: Elect a UCP MLA. But I digress.
The chambers’ news release listed four key ways that opting in to a national pharmcare program could help Alberta businesses:
1) It would help ensure Alberta remains an attractive place for people to work or start a business
2) Since 15 to 30 per cent of employer costs are related to providing employee benefits, it could save businesses big bucks
3) Improving the health of employees could result in more stable and reliable staff
4) And, yeah, since they pay federal taxes, “Albertans should have the opportunity to partake in the benefits…”
Will the UCP listen any more to its friends in business than it does to its long list of chosen foes in education, health care, and renewable energy, just to name a few? Probably not. The Smith Government seems quite resistant to opinions that run contrary to its belligerent approach to Confederation.
For her part, Health Minister Adriana LaGrange was sticking yesterday with Monday’s talking points on opting out of pharmacare and demanding the feds just hand over the money with no strings attached.
“The vast majority of Albertans already have access to drug coverage,” she insisted in a statement published on social media, a verbal shrug about the chambers’ concerns and others like them if ever there was one.
“The province is willing to work and discuss ways that the federal government can invest in Alberta’s pharmacare program to enhance the existing program that is comprehensive and currently available to Albertans,” it concludes. (Emphasis added.)
Alberta’s pharmacare program, as readers of this blog have been busy pointing out in the comments section, is not a pharmacare program, but a confusing hodgepodge of inadequate supports that leaves many ill Albertans with huge medical costs.
UCP moves South Edmonton Hospital from back burner to shelf
Did the UCP Government just promise to spend $20 million on a plan to create a plan for a new Edmonton children’s hospital that may be built eventually so they could pull the plug on the South Edmonton Hospital announced by the NDP government in May 2017?
Sure sounds like it. After all, $20 million might make a nice trust fund, but its chump change compared to the cost of a new modern hospital – for example, the first phase of Calgary’s South Health Campus cost $1.3 billion.
So, yesterday, LaGrange held a news conference to announce with great fanfare that that the government will be devoting a piddling $20 million for a pre-plan that might lead up to a plan to build a stand-alone Stollery Children’s Hospital someday in or near Edmonton.
A lot of official ink was devoted to this rather speculative announcement, without contributing many actual facts or timelines.
Meanwhile, Lagrange admitted that the badly needed South Edmonton Hospital, on which construction was supposed to start in 2020, will now be moved from the back burner, where former UCP Premier Jason Kenney put it as soon as he was elected in 2019, to the shelf.
“On the South Edmonton Hospital, we are pausing to have a more comprehensive look at how we can better serve the needs of Edmontonians and all of the north of Alberta that utilizes facilities within Edmonton,” LaGrange told reporters.
Presumably Edmontonians will continue to be punished until their morale improves enough to elect a UCP MLA.
An excellent night to a walk in the snow?
Today is the 40th anniversary of Pierre Trudeau’s famous walk in the snow.
It was on the evening of February 28, 1984, that the elder Trudeau took his possibly metaphorical, possibly literal walk through the blizzardy streets of Ottawa and made his mind up to leave politics permanently – having accomplished a remarkable amount during his 18 years in Parliament.
The next day, February 29 – 1984 being a leap year just like 2024 – he announced his decision to the world.
There are many in Canada, and not just opponents of the Liberal Party, who think tonight might be a fine time for Trudeau’s son, Justin, to take a similar contemplative walk.
Well, we’ll see, I suppose. It sounds, though, as if the younger Trudeau may decide instead to try to stick around until February 29, 2028.
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