The United Conservative Party’s claim that Alberta is the beneficiary of a record-breaking drive to recruit nurses from abroad seems divorced from reality.
In a UCP news release echoed repeatedly on social media by the party’s supporters, Health Minister Jason Copping was quoted saying that “under the United Conservatives, Alberta has seen the largest recruitment of nurses in our province’s history… 1,413 new internationally educated nurses call Alberta home.”
Now, there’s spin and there’s spin, but Copping’s claim travels pretty deep into the italics.
Maybe the UCP strategic brain trust is having to spend so much time spinning away their leader’s many outrageous statements from the recent past that they’re losing their grip on reality. Or maybe it’s something else.
Whatever it is, the notion that the UCP government is suddenly hiring nurses like they’re going out of style is not supported by the accessible facts. Albertans are entitled to ask Copping where these 1,413 new nurses that supposedly call Alberta home are working.
While the Copping’s news release did not explain where the 1,413 figure came from, social media posts by the UCP did: A May 10 Globe and Mail story that said the College of Registered Nurses of Alberta has registered the same number of nurses from abroad since April 4, when the regulatory college streamlined its application process for foreign-educated nurses.
The trouble is, there’s very little evidence many of these international nurses are working here in public hospitals – and it remains to be seen if they ever will be.
United Nurses of Alberta, which represents over 30,000 nurses including all registered nurses and registered psychiatric nurses employed by Alberta Health Services who are not in management, has seen the number of duespayers on its rolls grow by only 370 in the past 12 months.
The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, which represents licensed practical nurses, did not have exact numbers, but a spokesperson said AUPE has also not seen significant membership growth among LPNs either.
UNA’s growth rate of about one per cent also includes some new units previously not represented by a union, so not necessarily from the cohort of internationally educated nurses Copping is bragging about.
Meanwhile, between January 2022 and January 2023, the average annual growth rate of the population of Alberta was 3.7 per cent, according to the government.
So the actual recruitment of frontline nurses in hard-pressed public sector worksites in Alberta in the past year doesn’t sound very much like what the UCP calls “the largest recruitment of nurses in provincial history.”
So what’s going on?
Alberta’s health-care system remains in chaos. The province is desperately short of nurses, with more than 30 hospitals having faced service disruptions and more than 70 relying on “agency nurses,” expensive temporary employees hired through employment agencies, to keep their doors open. As a result, nurses employed by AHS have trouble getting time off approved.
The answers are mostly found in the Globe’s story.
Yes, thousands of foreign trained nurses would like to come to Canada. And, yes, as CRNA told the Globe, many of them are already in Canada but haven’t been able to work in their field up to now because of regulatory red tape.
But are the 1,413 CRNA specified all working now in Alberta? It’s possible, if they’re all in non-union private-sector workplaces. But that seems unlikely.
Where they obviously aren’t working is in public hospitals, as Copping implied and where they are so desperately needed.
Lucy Reyes, president of the Calgary-based Philippine Canadian Nurses Association, was right when she told the Globe it’s about time these regulatory changes were made. And eventually they may result in an influx of nurses from the Philippines and other countries.
But what likely happened at UCP Headquarters, swamped with bad news about the latest revelations of Premier Smith’s past idiocies, was that someone grasped at the rather thin straw offered by the Globe’s story.
Is there really a significant nurse recruiting campaign? Not yet.
Is this “the largest recruitment of nurses in provincial history”? Copping should be asked to prove it.
Will either of those claims ever be true? It seems unlikely.
Alberta is competing with the world for a limited number of highly educated professionals.
And Alberta, where just before the pandemic in 2019 the UCP was talking about laying off hundreds of RNs, hasn’t exactly gone out of its way to make itself attractive to medical professionals.
Man who wanted to lay off hundreds of nurses ascends to ATCO Board
Speaking of laying off hundreds of RNs, the guy who wanted to do that has just been rewarded with a comfortable seat on the board of ATCO, the Calgary-based energy conglomerate.
Former UCP premier Jason Kenney was put out to pasture last year despite his success creating the United Conservative Frankenparty by stitching together the Wildrose Party and the Progressive Conservatives after the NDP election victory in 2015.
He was replaced by Danielle Smith.
Both Kenney’s political demise and Smith’s ascension appear to have been made possible by the insurgency of the Take Back Alberta extremist group, which now significantly controls the UCP.
The ATCO Board made Kenney’s appointment, which had been telegraphed earlier, official yesterday.
Long-time Conservative activist says Premier Smith shouldn’t have been allowed to run
Speaking of Smith, a veteran Conservative activist told Calgary Herald political columnist Don Braid that Alberta’s premier should never have been allowed to run for the UCP leadership.
If she’d run to be a candidate, Ken Boessenkool said, she would have been disqualified.
This isn’t exactly a revelation to anyone who’s been paying attention, but props to the former advisor to Preston Manning, Ralph Klein, Stephen Harper, and Stockwell Day (among other big Conservative kahunas) for having the intestinal fortitude to state the obvious: Smith is no conservative, she’s a dangerous loon!
Those were my words, not Boessenkool’s, but why waste time on the nuanced version?
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