VICTORIA, B.C. – Are you wondering why Alberta Health Services would threaten nurses with layoffs in the middle of an international nurse shortage and a national health care crisis at the very moment the province’s governing United Conservative Party is trying to reassure everyone things in health care are just copacetic?
Last night aboard the MV Spirit of Vancouver Island on the darkened waters of the Salish Sea, without even a glimmer of moonlight on the wintry swells, there was no illumination either.
The United Nurses of Alberta reported yesterday in a news release that its director of labour relations received a letter Friday from the AHS director of labour relations warning there will be “reductions in positions within UNA’s AHS bargaining unit flowing from the movement of functions outside the organization.”
“AHS will also consider all options available to meet our organizational needs through this process, including changes to staff mix and service design, contracting out, changes or repurposing of sites or relocating, reducing or creasing provision of services,” the AHS letter also said. (Emphasis added.)
Members of the Alberta public should obviously be concerned by these possibilities as well.
UNA received a similar letter from the labour relations director of Covenant Health, the parallel publicly financed Roman Catholic health care system recently let out from under the thumb of AHS by Premier Danielle Smith’s government, and the second-largest health care employer in the province.
This, of course, is a reference to the UCP’s promised dismantling of AHS which, Ms. Smith, Health Minister Adriana LaGrange, and sundry MLAs, ministers and UCP flunkies have been reassuring us constantly will have no impact on the ever-improving level of health care they are determined to deliver from their hotel in Dubai or wherever the government’s brain trust is camped at any given time.
The letter was sent in the context of the union’s negotiations with the UCP Government, with employer labour relations departments acting as its marionette, for a new collective agreement with AHS, Covenant Health and other major employers.
When Ms. Smith and Ms. LaGrange recently announced the plan to dismantle, disassemble, discombobulate, or whatever, the province-wide health authority created in 2008 and 2009, there were those who suspected there was actually no plan at all. But the government’s message to nurses, and their union, was not to worry.
But this official talk of position reductions, UNA said in a news release yesterday, “appears to contradict what Minister of Health Adriana LaGrange told UNA representatives in face-to-face meetings.”
It also mirrored, UNA noted in its release, the pre-pandemic behaviour of health care employers at the start of the last round of contract negotiations in 2019. The employers then “laid out an AHS plan to eliminate an ‘estimated’ 500 full-time equivalent Registered Nurse jobs over the following three years” – which would have resulted in job losses for at least 750 nurses in the union’s estimation at the time.
Friday’s letters, and the government’s bumbling response to the brouhaha that publication of them by UNA set off yesterday, certainly suggests that it’s actually true there either is no plan, or if there is one, no one is quite sure what it is.
Asked in the Legislature by Opposition Leader Rachel Notley just what the heck is going on, Ms. LaGrange’s response was confusing: “The letter that went from AHS to the nursing union was in fact to notify them that given the refocus because of our contractual obligations, and the fact that they are in a position to bargain as of Dec. 2, that we needed to notify them that possibly some positions may move from AHS. They may shift, shift from AHS to the other organizations,” she burbled. “That’s all it was, Mr. Speaker.”
Read the letter, Ms. Notley advised the minister, and you’ll understand it’s about more than that. “In the midst of such a historical nursing crisis, which genius in the Premier’s Office thought that threatening the employment security of the nurses we do have is a good recruitment and retaining strategy?”
“We needed to notify the union that perhaps positions will shift from AHS to the other organization,” Ms. LaGrange responded. “But no decisions have been made. …”
Ms. Notley: “When will the UCP Government learn that nurses are an integral part of our health care system, and that we cannot keep them if we obviously repeatedly threatened to fire them?”
Ms. LaGrange: “Mr. Speaker, the letter was merely a contractual obligation.”
Ms. Notley: “That contractual obligation contradicts everything that minister just said.”
I have edited the transcript of the exchange to remove a lot of typical Question Period verbiage. Anyone who wants to read it word for word can consult Alberta Hansard today.
But the key points are covered. Ms. LaGrange has clearly memorized her talking points but doesn’t seem to truly understand what it going on – whatever it is, if anybody in the government even knows.
Perhaps the messaging will seem more plausible when Ms. Smith, an accomplished gaslighter, returns from Dubai.
In the meantime, we are left to consider a variety of possibilities. One is that there are actually several plans, and it is still to be determined which one will be carried out. Another could be that having no plan is actually part of the plan.
Regardless, the message to nurses, physicians and other health care professionals who may be choosing between Alberta and every other jurisdiction in North America that is short of medical professionals – which would be every jurisdiction in North America – is, wherever you go, don’t go to Alberta!
And as UNA noted in its news release yesterday: “According to the AHS website, there are more than 20 hospitals and health care centres currently reporting temporary service disruptions due to staff shortages, including the Fort Macleod Health Centre emergency department, which was temporarily closed on December 4 due to a shortage of nurses.”
Yet if you’re a nurse, nobody even knows who you’ll be working for, or whether or not you’ll have a job, a year from now!
Alberta’s health care recruiting program appears to be: Come to Alberta where we will immediately threaten to lay you off!
The province’s message to the nurses who are already here: Don’t worry, there’s no list, and you’re not on it.
Seriously, this is nuts! People who come up with stuff like this shouldn’t be running a peanut stand, let alone a health care system with more than 100,000 employees!
NOTE: In the interests of full disclosure, I am an employee of UNA. Also in the interests of full disclosure, when I wrote this, I really was aboard a large boat in the Salish Sea, getting my information haphazardly via smartphone. I am now somewhere with WiFi. Because I am on the road, metaphorically speaking, there will be fewer stories this week than readers are used to at AlbertaPolitics.ca. I will be back in Alberta soon.
I assume that the above UCP missive does not refer to chiropractors, naturopaths and necromancers who will be in great demand. Thankfully, the UCP left plenty of space on those TTC subway ads for various addenda. God help us all.
I know you don’t countenance unseemly language, but you should let me encourage a union that has shown outstanding fortitude! If I were a nurse? I’d paint a sign in 600 font red ink! What would it say? “F**k You” But that’s just me. And who am I after all. Fodder for the hegemony!
Oh and by the by.. If you let me swear I’ll do a little editing so a celtic band will pick your poetry for song. My apologies, Shane MacGowan is dead, but it’s his voice I hear.
“Last night aboard the MV Spirit… off the Vancouver Isle… on the darkened waters of the Salish Sea there was nought to see… not a glimmer of moonlight’s smile… on the wintry swells… then there we dwelt with?… illumination either.”
Excellent POGO. A def 8.5 out of 10. Canada Council is calling!
Lovely capture there, with a tip of the hat to the recently deceased Shane MacGowan,
I forgot the chorus.
“..Oh we can’t see though blind we be.. to the tender mercies held over.. ’cause we’re the crew on the ship.. it’s true! The grand MV our Spirit.
Well, it’s started. The only surprise is that it took this long. It’s been a bit more than six months since the election, after all.
I’d say the interpretation of the letters, and Adriana LaGrange’s clumsy response to Notley, is pretty clear. Some fool in the UCP government has decided to lay off nurses. LaGrange knows she’s finished if she just admits in public, but that’s the plan. The sock puppets in AHS and Covenant Health tried to gloss over it, but the subtext is clear.
Union positions will be cut. Private positions, somehow, will be created (possibly through agency hiring). The lucky nurses who score agency positions will benefit, their surviving unionized colleagues will be demoralized even more—and ordinary Albertans will, as usual, suffer.
Of course, this might just be the UCP’s collective idea of “contract negotiation” and “staking out an initial bargaining position.” Threaten to destroy the other guy, then offer to merely kneecap him, instead. He’s supposed to be grateful that you’ve “demonstrated restraint.” Riiiight.
(By the way, isn’t contact negotiation supposed to be between the employer and the union? I know too well that Con governments in Alberta loom ominously behind the AHS negotiators’ chairs, but jeez. LaGrange didn’t even try to hide it.)
Layoffs are inevitable. Presumably, ex-AHS nurses will be joined by support staff (kitchen, janitorial, laundry) if any are still union. Gotta pay for all those new CEOs and their executive assistants, all those advisory boards, that brand-new “secretariat” that’s gonna keep everybody talking together.
There’s worse to come. By the time Smith leads the UCP+TBA Party to defeat in 2027, it’ll be too late to completely undo the damage Smith and Anderson do to Alberta Health Services. With luck and inspired head-hunting for hospital administrators (not to mention big salaries to persuade candidates to tackle the Augean stables-size mess Smith will create), the four Smith-olated companies can be reduced to departments in Alberta Health Services 2.0. God only knows what Smith will do in the meantime to emergency services like ambulances, both ground-based and air.
PS: DJC, glad to hear you were able to get away for a time. I hope you had a chance to relax, in between teeth-gnashing sessions over the latest UCP stupidity-of-the-day.
Mike J Danysh: This is another version of Ralph Klein’s healthcare mess, so he could try and get it privatized, from more cuts. More nurses will be laid off, and leave Alberta, after this happens, as we saw when Ralph Klein was premier.
I really like “Smith-olated”. Excellent. And don’t worry about ground ambulances….that’s why we have Uber! And if contributions to the imaginary APP are retained by the employer, then Alberta will become a gigantic company town.
It remains my firmly held opinion that it was a pity the nurses didn’t strike early in Kenney’s tenure, It might have spread to a general strike that would have impeded Jay and Shandro, as they out blundered on, but out-maneuvered the doctors and many others.
ema: There is a process for getting to a legal strike, which involves bargaining first, reaching an impasse and then going through a number of steps. Illegal wildcat strikes are another matter, of course, but the conditions must be right for such action. DJC
“For all we’ve done? This is the thanks we get? Well Merry Christmas!” That’s your poster for a one day wildcat!
Danielle Smith’s solution to the housing crisis in Alberta is to drive all the workers away. First, kill the renewable energy sector. Next, kill the public health care sector. No workers, no housing crisis!
If industry shutdowns and layoffs aren’t enough to do it, Nate Horner let slip that an Alberta Pension Plan would keep funds in the hands of employers. Sounds like the UCP intend to kill employer contributions if they succeed in creating an Alberta Pension Plan. Who would want to work in Alberta, knowing they’ll only get half the pension people in other provinces will get?
The UCP government takes us all for rubes and slack-jawed yokels. Who should look in the mirror now?
Sadly, we the voters of Alberta have taught the various incantations of right wing politicians such as Smith et al to treat us like rubes and slack jawed yokels.
Cmon if they took us ALL for rubes they wouldn’t be so cagey. Their base tho, definitely.
Or same as the self employed, you get to make a double sized contribution, without tax deductibles available to the self employed? As some people say, this dog don’t hunt.
What Smith and the gang may do is lay off R.N.s and replace them with what used to be referred to as Practical nurses. Care aids would do the work of the Licensed Practical Nurses. It saves a lot of money.
Moving staff around could result in less qualified staff being transferrred to NDP ridings and more qualified staff being sent to hospitals in the areas where Smith’s donators live.
Smith could transfer the nurses to a private corporation who would be responsible for nurse staffing, pay and benefits, etc. Smith could choose to lay off all nurses and then let contracts to corporations who would supply nurses. Look for friends of government to then set up companies to take advantage of this new game.
Along with firing all nurses and having contractors handle everything, hospitals could be leased to corporations who would run them. little to no maintence would be done for the length of the contract, 25 years, and the building would be useless after that.
Nurses will have the option of moving to B.C. Yes I know housing is expemnsive in Greater Vancouver, but other parts of the province can be “affordable”, if its not Victoria or Kelowna.
You came to B.C.? Already looking for a new place to live?
You may think you want to live in Alberta, well maybe. But you don’t want to get sick in Alberta…horror story after.
Ivermectin from the Hot Dog Vendor (aka Premier)
Wherever is the TBAUCP/CUPTAB “brain trust”? Dubai? Elsewhere? How’s about ‘no place,’—literally utopian or, as Neil Young and Leonard Cohen separately sang, “Everybody knows…”
How can politicians be so impolitic? Well, it’s possible—even probable—that the UCP isn’t really a political entity at all but, rather, a viscid splattering of psephological jetsam from a passing partisan pelican which, if mere happenstance, makes Albertans more than unlucky.
Agreeing with Mike, above, the possibility of sabotage is palpable. Be that as it might, it’s still with incredulity that observers wonder how such an agenda will pan out. As TBAUCP/TABCUP actively convinces more and more Albertans to leave the province—while it still is one—it appears to entertain an interpretation of federation that’s less than myopic. The constitutionally guaranteed right of mobility of any Canadian citizen to live and work anywhere in the federation is what Alberta depends on—in fact it has by far the largest net interprovincial migration in Canada, five fold greater than the only other province with net positive interprovincial migration, BC, right next door—and in my observation the greatest source of BC’s 1.9% accumulated net interprovincial migration is, indeed, none other than the Wild Rose province itself. Danielle Smith et al of her Make-Alberta-Sovereign-Again counsel seem to take this demometric for granted while apparently making the province of petro-peeve less attractive to interprovincial migrants on not just one, but several fronts.
It’s not even remotely Clausewitzian in strategy. Furthermore, giving Albertans extant the option to avail Canada’s right of mobility seems more likely to divide and disperse Alberta’s primary human resource: Canadian workers. BC continues to benefit from Albertans resettling in Canada, hitherto mostly retirees who lived in Alberta only for the work, but it looks like working-age Albertans like doctors, nurses, and teachers will also continue to make the trek out. And, also due to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Section Six, opportunities exist—especially for healthcare personnel—in every other province, as well as in BC. Which is what makes the thinly-veiled sabotage of the AHS stand out and hog the spotlight, as ‘t were, while the other fronts of effrontery —UCP policies on pensions, policing, pollution, &c—play harmony to a malfeasant melody.
The objective of far-right, anti-government and impolitic sabotage is to irrevocably wreck the public enterprise in favour of the private, and to do it before the partisan proxy is electorally turfed. Presumably the TBAUCP/TABCUP presumes the only role of government is as personnel management of the petro-proletariat, reluctant provider of company-plan top-ups. Like Big Bitumen Bucks, Alberta’s hegemony in interprovincial migration terms emboldens gleeful cocking of the snook at the very source of the industry’s workforce. But ignoring the federal ecosystem in this respect is presumptuous indeed. Yet it fuels the pound-foolish notion of secession Danielle Smith keeps clasped to her hip, always ready to draw. At noon in the High River coral?
More like, wherever there’s sand deep enough to bury the brain trust like a three-legged dinosaur of petro-plumage.
But what if nobody showed up? ‘No problem,’ jingles Daniell’s spurs, ‘we got so much oil sands hell won’t have it,’ as she rolls a Bull Durham, one-handed, motioning over her shoulder with her other thumbs.
This has been asked before: is Alberta really trying to purge itself of non-TBAUCP/TABCUP voters? Objective observers cannot be faulted for thinking so.
So, the only position Smith left out, to recruit is come to Jay-Sus faith healers. Can this crew of charlatans be far behind in Smith’s new health service quackery. Dr. Benny Hin step on up.
Hello DJC,
This plan/non-plan, whichever it is, non-plan most likely, is insane! Hope you have a nice holiday, but please come back as soon as you can. We need as much sanity in this province as possible. The more I see, the more I am considering pulling up stakes after spending almost my entire adult life in Alberta, and hubby who grew up here, is thinking the same.
Well, my friend, there ain’t no shortage of “rubes and slack-jawed yokels” in and around these here parts.
You know what they say, Iffen it walks like a rube and slack-jawed yokel, and sounds like a rube and slack-jawed yokel …
“In the meantime, we are left to consider a variety of possibilities. One is that there are actually several plans, and it is still to be determined which one will be carried out. Another could be that having no plan is actually part of the plan.”
This is the circumstance that every decision-maker finds herself or himself in. Nothing unusual or particularly worrisome about it. Difference is in the competence, or lack of such, in that particular decision maker or process.
At any point in time you’ll find yourself in the wilderness. You could go any which way and that might take you closer to your objective or not.
So, first off, determine your position. In reality! As versus some favorite fantasy. This steps loses 80% of the people vying for competent decision maker status.
Next, recognize that you have limited resources, like food, water and shelter but also Time and People. And that you have an unlimited set of plans, paths or directions.
So any plan you make, any step you take, in any direction whatsoever, for any reason faire or foul, is most likely to lead you away from your objective. For there is only path or plan that most competently and effectively achieves your objective. And it is not obvious.
Hence, for any one follower, citizen and voter it is of paramount important to carefully choose the most competent leadership.
In this Albertan’s have failed. Miserably!