CALGARY – According to the minister of health’s press secretary, there was “no error, and no undue delay” in the case of an 86-year-old Calgary woman who bled to death Sunday after being mauled by three pit bulls that escaped from a neighbour’s yard into the alley behind her home.
Sure, there may have been a half-hour wait for the ambulance to get there, but that was someone else’s fault.
Steve Buick’s indignant tweets to that effect yesterday suggest nothing has really changed with the folks in charge of communications for the lame-duck Kenney Government.
UCP social media “issues managers,” press secretaries and their ilk have always seemed inappropriately aggressive in their responses to anyone who dared to criticize this government for any reason. This applied to ordinary citizens and political partisans alike. It was clearly part of Mr. Kenney’s policy of picking fights with everyone, and that in turn is a big part of why his own party turned on him as viciously as it did.
Still, the appalling death of the woman identified by neighbours as Betty Ann Williams – coming as it did in the midst of a crisis in the province’s ambulance system that has happened on the UCP’s watch and for which the UCP must shoulder responsibility – made it a powerful symbol of just how bad things have become.
Yet the circumstances are such that this is clearly one of those times when the best policy would be to humbly accept the blame and promise to get to the bottom of what happened and do better.
But that’s not the UCP style.
Mr. Buick told the CBC, in the words of the network’s report, that his boss, Health Minister Jason Copping, “was ‘relieved’ to hear that the AHS investigation confirmed there was no undue delay in the EMS response.”
Mr. Copping should have been appalled. You could almost hear Albertans all over the province muttering, WTF?
Responding to a tweet by the Health Sciences Association of Alberta, the union that represents most Alberta paramedics and EMTs, including those employed by Alberta Health Services, Mr. Buick said, “AHS now confirms there was no error, no undue delay.”
To HSAA’s point that the union is “fed up with grieving the failures of this system,” and its conclusion – which surely every reasonable person agrees with, regardless of their politics – that “EMS should be there when you need it,” Mr. Buick shot back: “This tweet and other comments have turned out to be grossly wrong. Over to you.”
HSAA wisely refused to rise to the bait.
Calgary Herald political columnist Don Braid, no ill-mannered firebrand, tweeted telegraphically that “AHS and Copping say ambulance response was fine because dog attack was first treated as a police matter. They should immediately release transcripts or recordings of calls to 911 dispatch.”
This is a plausible summation of what the minister and AHS said, and a completely reasonable conclusion about what should happen next.
Mr. Buick’s riposte to Mr. Braid: “‘Fine’? No one says it’s fine, this is shockingly unfair. AHS said the initial 911 call came to EMS via police as non life threatening. When EMS got info that it was life threatening, they were there in 9 mins. This is just too much politics, too much distortion. It’s wrong.”
This kind of response, needless to say, is not fine.
Judging by the reaction on social media, it certainly appeared to outrage almost everyone who read it, some of whom were pretty harsh. Many commented how profoundly unfair it was to the neighbour who tried to call the ambulance to be blamed for the slow response in this particularly shocking, but not untypical, case.
As a regular commenter on this blog put it yesterday: “This is what we are now: a province of blame-shifters who attack good people who step in to help their fellow human beings in need …”
It’s hard to argue with Tony Clark, a former chief of staff to an NDP minister back in the day, when he said yesterday that “there needs to be an investigation into the response of the police and AHS.”
This, of course, is exactly what the UCP doesn’t want to happen, and is unlikely to permit.
“Buick is right here about too much politics and distortion,” Mr. Clark added in his tweet, with the qualification that the press secretary was “perhaps wrong about the source.”
“Cut through the spin,” Mr. Clark concluded. “Call in a third party to investigate. What happened was horrific and unacceptable.”
Whoever replaces Jason Kenney as United Conservative Party leader and Alberta’s top politician is going to want to put as much distance as possible as quickly as possible between their government and the former premier’s three years of misrule – one symptom of which is the slow-motion collapse of the provincial ambulance service we are all observing now with fear and horror.
For whomever replaces Mr. Kenney, this will present something of a challenge, of course. After all, misrule is defined quite differently by different groups of politically minded Albertans – those appalled by Mr. Kenney’s childishly optimistic approach to COVID-19, for example, and those who think he should have ignored the entire pandemic in the name of “freedom.”
Indeed, the UCP’s official reaction to Sunday’s tragedy is reminiscent of Premier Kenney’s famous response to the toll of COVID-19 in June 2020, when he blithely told the Legislature, “The average age of death from COVID in Alberta is 83, and I’ll remind the House that the average life expectancy in the province is 82.”
Former Progressive Conservative deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk responded at the time: “So, Alberta seniors, if you managed to live to 82 your shelf life is over. You can die.”
Mr.Kenney later tried to do a bit of damage control with radio talk show host Danielle Smith, now a candidate to replace him, telling her that that “I’m trying to, through the data and the facts, bring balance to the debate, to point out that we can safely re-engage in economic and social activity that is critical to our livelihoods and our lives together.”
Two years later, Albertans are still dying almost daily from COVID-19, although we’re paying far less attention now.
Still, surely one thing that most UCP leadership candidates could agree upon is the need to restore a civil tone to the government’s communications, especially its direct communications with citizens.
Indeed, you’d think the government would want to send a memo to that effect to its ministers’ press secretaries right now.
Unless they did, of course, and someone didn’t get the memo.
UPDATE: ATA members ratify agreement, barely
Alberta teachers represented by the Alberta Teachers Association have voted 51.1 per cent in favour of accepting the terms of settlement proposed by a mediator in collective bargaining.
The result of the vote by teachers employed by public, separate and francophone school boards announced by the ATA “show that this offer is the absolute minimum that teachers were willing to accept,” ATA President Jason Schilling said today in a statement.
The Teachers Employer Bargaining Association also needs to vote for the mediator’s recommendation for it to become a legal agreement, the ATA said in its news release. If the TEBA votes to accept the agreement, the recommendations will be incorporated into the 61 collective agreements for teachers and school boards. Agreements for local conditions will still have to be negotiated.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” commented Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan in a tweet. “This deal is about as popular with ATA members as Jason Kenney is with his party. The UCP has really poisoned the well with teachers.”
In all, 11,721 teachers voted yes to ratify the contract, 11,080 or 48.3 per cent voted no, and 120 ballots were spoiled, 0.5 per cent. The total vote was 23,101.
Voting took place from Sunday to yesterday.
I doubt any memo has been sent about restoring a civil tone and it will probably not be as long as Kenney is still in power. He style will not change to he and his government will remain a lightning rod for discontent.
However, you have to wonder how anyone who takes over is going to clean up this mess. It requires more than just a reshuffling of the cabinet deck, if most of the confrontational and pugnacious ministers and staff also remain. Yeah it sounds like Brian Jean would likely get rid of one particularly bad one, but what about the rest? I suppose they are mostly supporting Mr. Toews campaign, hoping that the change in tone will only be at the top.
Some of the other leadership campaign candidates have hinted at more contrition, such as an apology to health care workers and others, but those candidates are not leading currently. The leading ones are playing it safe and have said less, illustrating the dilemma of how to distance themselves from the record of a party or a government they were a part of.
I suspect they are mostly hoping that as one prominent Federal Conservative once said after Harper’s departure, it will be sufficient for voters that ” the bad man is gone”. It does not seem the main contenders for the UCP leadership want fundamental change and they don’t even seem that interested in the symbolic so far. Yes, it was Kenney who ran amok, caused a lot of damage over the last few years and continues to do so, but lets not forget that it was his party, particularly his MLA’s and Cabinet, who supported this throughout.
In the private sector, a communications professional that responded in such a mean-spirited, adversarial, and callous manner to a public and well-justified criticism would likely be fired in short order.
I am not sure what has happened to Mr. Buick. At one point, a number of years ago, if I remember correctly, he behaved in a much more professional and less partisan manner. Like Benjamin Button, he appears to be aging backwards, at least with regard to his emotional judgement and capacity for empathy. His response is childish and cruel.
One of my early memories as a child involved a private ambulance service called Smith’s. (Children recognize brand logos before they can read; ask fast-food marketing executives.) My mother and I were walking home from an appointment. There was an ambulance in the parking lot of our neighborhood grocery store. When we got closer, my mother realized that her aunt was on the stretcher. She had had a heart attack in the store. There she was, dead, for everyone to see. I remember asking my mother then and there why they didn’t cover up her underwear. Her dress had flipped up, and that is the way the attendants left her: no blanket, no dignity.
This was in the days of the scoop-and-run private ambulances, although I didn’t know it what that meant at the time. Attendants were men with driver’s licences who could carry a stretcher. They were not EMTs or paramedics. The drivers used to listen to the scanner and try to beat the competing private ambulance companies to a call. Whoever got there first scooped the patient and drove to the nearest hospital. Whoever delivered got paid. This was not how things were supposed to work. Dispatchers assigned ambulances, giving the companies turns, much like how some police services assign tow truck companies.
The ambulances in those days looked like hearses of the era. There was little to no care for patients until they were delivered to the hospital.
Anyways, if a five-year-old child could see that private ambulances fell far short in the dignity department (and almost every other way), sensible adults did, too. The ambulance service was made public soon after. The private companies were not happy. Good riddance to those vultures, I say.
Here we are in 2022, and there are no sensible adults in charge of our province. Bullies and tyrants don’t care about people like Betty Ann Williams, or you, or me. If Betty Ann could not make her own 911 call and give detailed information about her condition, then attend to her injuries herself while driving herself at the regulated speed limit to the hospital in her personal vehicle, and presumably minding where she parked at the emergency entrance, well, she shouldn’t live in Alberta. Alberta has no time for people of “limited human capital”, over the age of 82 and past their expiry date anyways.
It’s not like there are dispatch protocols for dog maulings, or for people who might be of an age when blood thinners are commonly prescribed. Sure, we have protocols for fire calls, including what types and number of vehicles to send to certain types of calls, but
buildings are worth money. Surely you don’t expect that kind of service for elderly people mauled by dogs, do you? After all, they might die within a few years anyways.
Betty Ann Williams could be you or me. We all deserve better. It cannot get much worse. Soon we’ll be back to the old scoop-and-dash. Our government says the system worked just fine the day Betty Ann died a horrific death, bleeding out from her injuries. Things worked the way they are supposed to work, they say, and all this is the fault of Betty’s neighbors. It is hard to imagine a more disgusting response! There is not one ounce of humanity to be found amongst all these officials put together. We live in a state where life apparently means nothing any more, and dignity doesn’t exist.
I am bereft for Betty Ann.
The UCP government responded begrudgingly, too little, too late, as always, in response to public shaming over their callous remarks and complete lack of any semblance of human decency:
https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/kenney-says-ahs-must-find-out-what-went-wrong-with-response-to-calgary-dog-attack-1.5940274
RE: your point about Alberta not really caring about COVID anymore.
I really enjoyed watching the Oilers playoff run, but I was put off and disgusted by the arena being full of cheering maskless people (I’m aware other teams and arenas did the same and am unimpressed by whattaboutisms). I couldn’t help but feel like the NHL, Oilers, Alberta Government and (wealthy) hockey fans alike just don’t care whether facts are real, or whether their neighbours live or die, or what happens to their health care system, or especially what happens to the less fortunate, as long as they get what they want. I wonder what it’s like to look at a crowd of people, knowing that it is statistically inevitable that people will die as a result of this crowd being assembled, and think, “It’s so nice to have the fans in the building again,” instead of, “Sweet salty Christ, are we so hung up on having people cheer for us that we’ll cause deaths to make it happen?” To me, it absolutely reeked of entitlement, decadence and ableism. I think it very strange that so many people want to pretend covid is over. Someone asked me the other day when I’ll stop wearing a mask; I told them “when I can be sure no one else will die because of my choice.”
So well written and expressed. We have as many head in the sand types here in Ontario. Will we ever learn?
Well, people are dying daily of Covid in my province of exactly one million souls, so I’m sure that it’s more than “almost” daily in Alberta.
Ambulance services are crap nationwide, but not usually because of the ambulance services themselves. It’s because they spend/waste their time hauling people to overcrowded hospitals full of people suffering from the plague official Canada has deemed to be over. Full ambulances sit around waiting at hospitals with new patients until the facility can actually admit them from the vehicles and examine them. That’s the extent of the overcrowding — no space to unload new Emerg cases. And not many free ambulances available to respond to horrific incidents like this death by mauling. Because they’re parked up at hospitals.
And tra la la, people and dopey governments carry on as if the pandemic was over. All my relatives and friends who’ve caught Covid have done so since mid-March when mask mandates were being lifted. Omicron is a bugger and seems to be officially forgotten, because it’s so boring and yesterday.
Horrible news for the ATA’s leadership, which is obviously in deep trouble with members. They recommended ratification, pushed hard to get teachers to go along with a lousy deal on the grounds there was no alternative, and still nearly lost. They got a lower percentage than Jason Kenney did in his ratification vote. A bad year for Jasons!
I presume that the next news releases from the UCP concerning another unfortunate incident will continue their weird pattern of being more confrontational than consolatory…
Rising job site injuries and zero standards for worker safety enforcement…”Well, at least their pay cheques were huge, am I right? Huh? Huh? Boom times, baby.”
Falling revenues affecting municipal program funding…”Doesn’t anyone keep a penny jar any more? Put the pennies in a jar for a rainy day. It’s that easy.”
The continuing collapse of elder care heath services…”Ummm, there is a best before date, and look who’s passed theirs.”
Rising urban and rural violent crime, homelessness, and a general state of malaise across the province … “It could be worse, you could be living in one of those Democrat controlled blue cities in the US.”
The UCP, once again, prefer their pursuit of proven failed ideology, over doing what makes sense. Centralized dispatch of paramedic services is a blunder that resorts back to the days of Ralph Klein’s time as premier of Alberta. He did it, and it was more costly than he thought it would be, going more than double the initial cost, from $55 million, to $125 million. It also put the lives of Albertans at risk. I had personal experience with how bad this system is. Once, I encountered someone lying on the ground, and I didn’t know what state their health was in. I phoned 911, and was asked what city I was calling from, and I also was asked to provide an address. They needed an address, but I had to find the address of the building that this person was lying closest to. I was trying to explain that I saw a person lying on the ground. Also, centralized dispatch of paramedic services was revisited by the Alberta PCs, and the NDP. A few different health ministers in total looked at the prospects of centralized paramedic dispatch service, and they all shot the idea down. From Dave Hancock, to Sarah Hoffman, and other Alberta health ministers in between, including Stephen Mandel, this was not pursued, because they knew better. The UCP doesn’t know better, and yet they want to shove this bad idea onto municipalities in Alberta, despite the proven risks that it will cause. This latest example shows how much of a mess the UCP have made out of healthcare in Alberta. More people will perish, which is unfortunate, due to the UCP’s tampering with healthcare in Alberta, including with paramedic dispatch services.
Anonymous Then add in the privatization of road maintenance that former MLAs told me increased the cost to taxpayers by 300 percent. Add in the cost of vehicle registration that went from $35 per vehicle to $85 and Kenney added another $5.to it. Privatization of liquor stores added 50 percent to the cost of liquor , and members of our family own three of them, and as police officers pointed out it gave us the highest percentage of drunks on our roads, likely in North America. Then of course there was the privatization of the issue of driver’s licenses that police officers stated was just plan stupid and a driver who shouldn’t have been driving killed 16 members of a hockey team. The list goes on and on including our power bills, yet as you and I know these stupid seniors who continue to hurl their sarcastic comments at us for not being as stupid as them continue to believe every lie they feed them.
“The total vote was 23,101” How many members were eligible?
!?: Approximately 46,000. DJC
In light of the CBC story linked below, Justice Minister Tyler Shandro’s own aggressive communication strategy needs to be looked at as well.
In response to 2 daytime murders in Edmonton’s Chinatown, and problems on the LRT, Tyler Shandro invoked a clause in the Police Act and demanded that Edmonton’s mayor, Amarjeet Sohi prepare an action plan on how the city was going to solve the problem.
As a result of the CBC investigation, it appears that there is a fairly clear line from the murders right back to Mr. Shandro’s own department. The man charged with the murders had recently been granted bail with strict conditions to live with a family friend, stay out of Edmonton, and get treatment for his addictions.
Turns out there were no beds for addictions treatment. After less than 3 weeks the fellow hosting the accused felt unsafe living with the accused and called the RCMP to take him away. The RCMP did not know what to do with the accused, it was a Sunday and they could not reach his probation officer, so they just dropped him off in Edmonton.
No beds for treatment, no guidance for the police – both have a direct line to our provincial government.
The Kenney government’s use of abrasive communications seems to adopt an attitude that the best defense is a good offense. It is not always smart.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/justin-bone-chinatown-homicides-bail-release-1.6483440
If you look on the AHS Covid site, the average age of death due to Covid is now 78. That’s 5 years younger than it was. I guess our shelf life is now 77?