On December 30, Edmonton Sun commentator Rick Bell published a column suggesting Premier Danielle Smith plans a purge of Alberta Health Services (AHS) that will reach deep into the middle ranks of the province-wide public health care agency’s management.
“Layers and layers and layers of middle managers have been the problem,” Smith was quoted saying by Bell, who has often been used by the United Conservative Party (UCP) government to signal its intentions to its base and float ideas to see how they might be received by voters more generally.
“If I’m successful by the time we go into the next election, everyone will have a family practitioner, whether it’s a doctor or a nurse practitioner,” claimed Smith, who promised to fix the health care system within 90 days 460 days ago.
According to Bell, Smith and Health Minister Adriana LaGrange are about to embark on a tour of Alberta’s hospitals where they will decide willy-nilly which managers to fire. Since it will be impossible to meaningfully measure competence in such a time frame, the simplest explanation is that they plan to fire managers who show signs of resisting their ideologically motivated policies.
“Yes, fire managers,” Bell cheered enthusiastically. “Lower the boom, hand out pink slips, give them the boot, show them the door.”
Yesterday, meanwhile, Jeremy Appel at the Progress Report reported on a leaked audio recording of Take Back Alberta founder David Parker bragging during an online pep talk on “conservatizing municipal councils and school boards” how he plans to purge the education system of administrators and other workers who support basic rights for 2SLBGTQIA+ students and employees.
Take Back Alberta, commonly referred to as TBA, is the far-right faction that now dominates the Board of the UCP, and which credits itself with having removed former premier Jason Kenney and replaced him with Smith.
With talk of “the tyranny of the rainbow guard,” presumably a sophomoric reference to the Red Guards of Mao Zedong’s China, and the preposterous claim this is a “new form of communism, it’s called queer theory,” Parker often sounds unhinged. Given his influence over Premier Smith, however, just like Bell he needs to be taken seriously.
In Parker’s vision of a far-right takeover of Alberta’s school boards – presumably by home-schoolers who don’t have their children in public or Catholic schools – “school boards hire and fire superintendents, superintendents hire and fire principals, principals hire and fire administration, teachers and teachers’ assistants at schools, so if we can begin firing the people that are pushing this ideology and hiring the people who aren’t, we will have a huge impact on our children’s education.”
In other words, he wants a purge too.
So what’s with all this purge talk by the UCP, and in how many other areas of government is the party eyeing the same thing?
Presumably we are now at the point with the UCP that most Albertans, whether or not they support the government, understand there is no certainty this is just talk. Indeed, this may represent a real plan to eliminate the Canadian tradition of a neutral civil service and replace it with a partisan structure that will do the party’s will without argument or regard for the rule of law.
It seems quite likely, given the circles in which they run, that the UCP has been inspired by former US president Donald Trump’s vow that if he returns to office he will quickly purge thousands of federal public employees and thoroughly politicize the US public service.
Parker’s remark, quoted by Appel, that most school board officials would fall into line with his nouveau régime echoes the belief of Trump’s political strategists in far-right think tanks that the same thing would happen with most of the 50,000 civil servants on their purge list.
Whether or not this happens – in Alberta or the United States – depends ultimately on the behaviour of voters and the willingness of engaged citizens to push back.
We would be well advised to take such talk ideological purges seriously.
In the event public sector purges go ahead in Alberta – even on a modest scale – one unintended consequence is bound to be a large number of expensive lawsuits by wrongfully dismissed managers for which taxpayers will have to foot the bill, followed by big-dollar payouts and non-disclosure agreements.
At this point, I would suggest this is almost a certainty at AHS. And if purge mania spreads, so will the costs.
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