Ever since emergency medicine physicians in Edmonton called last Friday for Alberta to declare a state of emergency about the catastrophic condition of the city’s hospital Emergency Rooms, the only sound from Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP) has been an unnerving silence.
Out here in Wild Rose Country, we have four health ministers. Not one of them has uttered so much as a chirp!
So what are Adriana LaGrange, Matt Jones, Rick Wilson and Jason Nixon up to? Playing a friendly game of hearts, perhaps? Nobody seems to know.
“We’re operating in disaster mode every day,” Dr. Paul Parks told The Globe and Mail on Friday, after the Edmonton group made the call for an emergency declaration under the province’s Public Health Act. Dr. Parks, an ER physician himself, is president-elect of the Alberta Medical Association’s emergency medicine section and a former president of the association. So you can be pretty confident he knows what he’s talking about.
But even if you mistrust experts as much as the UCP does, all you have to do is ask any health care worker about the state of the province’s hospitals generally, and emergency rooms in particular, and they’ll give you pretty much the same answer.
Patients have been left waiting in Edmonton ERs as long as 72 hours in recent days. At least three have died in the city’s emergency rooms, one of them for sure after he’d waited eight hours to see a doctor.
“It’s daily carnage,” another ER physician told the CBC. “The overload of human misery is tough to witness.”
“The premier and health ministers have been silent for weeks while doctors and patients are sounding the alarm,” NDP Health Critic Sarah Hoffman said in a statement. “Whether it’s Minister LaGrange, Minister Jones, Minister Nixon, Minister Wilson, the chief medical officer of health, or the premier herself, someone needs to explain what the plan is.”
That canned statement was weak, as NDP communications unfortunately frequently are nowadays. Hoffman, who did a better job as health minister from 2015 to 2019 than any of Alberta’s four co-health ministers do now, or the lot of them combined for that matter, cut to the chase and made a sharper observation in an interview Monday. She told Global News, “I think that the UCP is intentionally making it so much worse in Alberta hoping that people will say, ‘Well, then, we have to privatize everything.’”
You have to admit, while that was just a theory, it’s completely plausible based on the UCP Government’s behaviour to date.
One thing that is glaringly obvious is that while Alberta’s population has grown by about 800,000 people since 2019, the UCP hasn’t built a single new hospital in the capital city, which serves as a medical specialty hub for the northern half of the province.
In fact, the last time anyone thought about a new hospital for Edmonton, it was in 2017, when NDP premier Rachel Notley announced plans to build one in the city’s southwest.
“We want to make sure residents in one of Edmonton’s fastest-growing areas are provided medical care as close to home as possible,” Hoffman said at the on-site announcement ceremony on May 30 that year.
Brian Mason, the infrastructure minister of the day, observed that the new facility would be “the first hospital to be built in Edmonton in over a generation.”
Only it wasn’t, of course. In 2019, along came Alberta’s first UCP premier, Jason Kenney, who, Trump-like, was determined to undo everything the NDP government had done in its four years in power, no matter how much sense it made or how much value it added. The health care crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic was still in his future.
After the UCP’s 2023 re-election, with Danielle Smith at the helm and not a single government seat in Edmonton, the project was in real trouble. Smith, as was obvious even before the vote on May 29, 2023, was never a leader for all Albertans. But if there was anything the UCP understood, it was revenge. So, on March 1, 2024, Finance Minister Nate Horner made it official in his budget that the project was kaput.
And here we are less than two years after that and the entire health care system is in chaos. Last I checked, residents of south Edmonton were being told to consider driving to Red Deer if they had a medical emergency.
LaGrange, the former UCP health minister, has been demoted to the primary and preventative health portfolio; Jones is responsible for hospital and surgical services; Wilson for mental health and addiction services; Nixon for assisted living and social services. The only official word we’ve heard since the doctors’ call for an emergency declaration was from LaGrange’s press secretary, who tried to blame it all on the flu season.
Well, maybe one of the ministers will have something to say later this week. Or maybe they’ll just stand by while Premier Smith turns up the gaslights.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
