Danielle Smith is always the smartest person in any room she’s in, so back in August 2022 when she was running to lead the United Conservative Party, she didn’t need to hesitate even for a moment when she was asked about what to do if hospitals filled up again with COVID-19 patients.
“If the hospitals start to get overrun, what would you do?” asked the host of the online event, former MLA Bruce McAllister, one of the Wildrose members who crossed the floor of the Legislature with Ms. Smith to join the Progressive Conservatives on Dec. 17, 2014 – a day that lived in infamy in Alberta until it didn’t, but long enough to get an NDP majority elected for a full term in office. Nowadays, Mr. McAllister is executive director of Ms. Smith’s office in Calgary’s McDougall Centre.
Ms. Smith didn’t even pause for breath before saying, “I can tell you exactly what I would do!”
To be fair, while the Zoom session was billed as a virtual town hall, it was clearly a campaign event ginned up to support Ms. Smith, so I suppose she knew in advance what the questions were going to be.
“The No. 1 thing that I keep hearing is that we have a lot of capacity in acute-care beds, but we have long-term-care patients who are awaiting permanent placement in long-term-care homes that are actually in our acute-care beds in hospitals,” she chirped.
“And I have to figure, there’s gotta be a more comfortable place for them to go.
“I was thinking, maybe a hotel would be a better environment!”
Fast-forward to yesterday.
The CBC’s Julia Wong reported how on March 4 a 62-year-old Edmonton man paralyzed on one side after a serious stroke was stuffed into a taxi at the Royal Alexandria Hospital in Edmonton, where he had been housed for about six months since he was stricken, and driven 35 miles south to a $47-a-night motel in Leduc.
“They told me I was going to a facility for long-term care,” Blair Canniff told Ms. Wong. Instead, he found himself in a motel room too small to accommodate his wheelchair.
After that, the story grows murky – although this is not the reporter’s fault.
Alberta Health Services had nothing useful to say. It wouldn’t make a spokesperson available. It refused to answer Ms. Wong’s questions. It issued a short printed statement that can fairly be described as intended to dodge and obfuscate, not to illuminate.
“Different discharge options are considered …” Oh, please!
Mind you, AHS is in a state of terrified chaos thanks to the massive, expensive and counterproductive restructuring of its operations into four easy-to-privatize silos by Ms. Smith, who is so smart she doesn’t need the advice of anyone who knows anything about health care, and Health Minister Adriana LaGrange, the Mike Pence of Canadian politics.
The care provider named in the CBC story, identified as Contentment Social Services, didn’t return any of the reporter’s calls or emails.
The non-profit company’s website reads like it was assembled by an Artificial Intelligence program that didn’t receive very clear instructions. Its About Us section says nothing about them. And according to The Breakdown, the company does business out of a drop-in hot-desk operation in downtown Edmonton.
Apparently a couple of care workers of some description visited Mr. Canniff in his room from time to time, Ms. Wong reported. He was fed fast food.
A week later, another taxi came for Mr. Canniff and took him back to the Royal Alex, where he remains.
Albertans are entitled to ask, what the hell is going on?
Where – and how – did Alberta Health Service get the idea that a Travelodge motel in Leduc, of all places, where according to the desk clerk several rooms have been rented by some sort of care company, was an appropriate place to house a patient suffering the after-effects of a serious stroke?
What role did Premier Smith’s past advocacy of using hotels for continuing care play in this AHS decision?
Who runs the company that was supposed to provide after-stroke care in a cheap motel far south of the city? Has it been sent other clients by AHS? What are the qualifications of the caregivers employed by the company?
If the pressure continues to get to the bottom of this story, we are likely to be told eventually it was all a terrible mistake, and that measures have been taken to ensure it won’t happen again. Perhaps someone will be found to fall on their sword.
But, mark my words, there is a clear line that connects the dots between the words spoken by Ms. Smith at her campaign town hall on Aug. 12, 2022, and the arrival of Mr. Canniff at the Travelodge in Leduc, where he thought “it was sort of a joke.”
At her 2022 Zoom event, Ms. Smith said she’d been thinking about continuing care …
She’s been thinking about it, alright.
Indeed, as a former Fraser Institute apparatchik, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d been thinking about things like treating continuing care facilities as hotel-industry profit centres for a long time.
And as the person who always reckons she’s the smartest in the room, there’s absolutely no need for her ever to change her mind just because the evidence doesn’t support her half-baked, baked-in conclusions.
What do you want to bet this has happened to a lot more people than just Mr. Canniff?
Danielle Smith’s actual words
There was more of interest in Ms. Smith’s Aug. 12, 2022, “town hall” remarks, of course.
During her Zoom session, she peddled paranoid conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum, trotted out some of her whack-a-doodle environmental beliefs, and complained about “cancel culture.” (Remember that? We don’t hear much about cancel culture anymore now that it’s the UCP that’s cancelling AHS leaders who behaved responsibly during the pandemic and trans Albertans seeking medical care.)
Nevertheless, I believe it is important to pay attention in detail to what influential politicians actually say. Here is my transcription of Ms. Smith’s answer to Mr. McAllister’s question about how to respond to packed acute-care wards, quoted in part above:
Mr. McAllister: “… If the hospitals start to get overrun, what would you do?”
Ms. Smith: “I can tell you exactly what I would do! I was actually having a conversation with members of our continuing-care services, because I’ve been trying to figure out how we create the surge capacity that AHS has so far failed to do. This is the thing that really bothers me about Alberta Health Services, is that they, we gave them direct instruction, the premier did, to expand surge capacity. And the numbers were there: 761 more ventilators, 1,081 more ICU beds, and they didn’t do it. In fact, when the Delta surge came, they came clean and said, ‘Whoops, actually we’ve decreased the number of ICU beds.’ So I’ve been talking to a lot of people about how we are supposed to address this, and the No. 1 thing that I keep hearing is that we have a lot of capacity in acute-care beds, but we have long-term-care patients who are awaiting permanent placement in long-term care homes that are actually in our acute-care beds in hospitals. It’s something like 60 per cent of the beds are filled with people who are awaiting long-term placement. And I have to figure, there’s gotta be a more comfortable place for them to go. I was thinking maybe a hotel would be a better environment! Well, when I talked to the continuing-care folks today, they said that we may in a lot of facilities, we have about 20 to 30 per cent excess capacity, and they would be more than happy to provide some kind of transition housing so that we can free up those beds, so that we have the capacity, so that when patients come into the Emergency Room, we can get them moved through so that they’re not, so that we’re not doing hallway medicine.” …
Now that we can add this to the list of FUBAR stunts pulled by the UCP, are the NDP stalwarts still debating how long someone ought to be a member as opposed to who can win the next election?
I would tend to focus my ire and scorn more on the Alberta electorate, not on the party that has been offering a credible, clear, alternate vision for what, at least two generations? Offering and demonstrated.
Ms Smith and her grossly incompetent health minister haven’t got the slightest interest in what happens to actual people. Particularly vulnerable people – and even more – vulnerable people with limited assets. The lowest on the pole for them? Anyone who can’t vote – ie – people in long-term care deemed unable to care for themselves. So who cares where they warehouse them? They’re just going to die anyway, right?
I spent close to 8 years with my mother in long term care. My wish for Ms Smith and Ms LaGrange is that they would have the opportunity to experience first hand the helplessness that comes with being so vulnerable. Shame on them for treating anyone so callously.
Tana, this just demonstrates the values of these two smartest in any room, entitled divas.
This is all an absolute embarrassment for someone who understands responsibility, but for this government and this Premier I can only say one thing for sure – they will not be sent to an hotel room if they get a stroke. That is for sinners and loosers like the rest of us.
By the way I am not being sarcastic.
This is the same pedantic atittude they displayed so many times during COVID and throughout Jason Kenney’s Kingdom with lunches at Alison’s Redford Palace and the trips to Mexico against all the pandemic rules at the time. Never mind the alchool abuse and employee harrassment. Yes we tend to forget but I do not.
The only thing that disgusts me more is the 47% support of this complete disrespect of everything we value in a society and get away with it. Shame on us.
Carlos: I remember how horrible Ralph Klein was, and the UCP have likely outdone him. Danielle Smith is absolutely disgusting.
Anonymous – Ralph Klein is a moderate compared with this crap.
Another day another example of Marlaina’s absolute lack of compassion for anyone other than billionaires. She should be ashamed of herself, but she is incapable of it. Minister Lagrange should resign over this, but it’s been a long time since any politician had the decency to do the right thing. It’s hard to imagine this government can stoop any lower, but give it a few days.
1. “Albertans are entitled to ask, what the hell is going on? . . . .” Followed by the deadest of dead silence.
2. “Patients scattered on AHS’s Highway dying, questions crowd the old blogger’s fragile eggshell mind.”
3. “Why ask why? All “mysteries” (involving lobbying, influence peddling, and the shameless profiteering of the connected insider class) are just more needles in the camel’s eye.” It could be no other way for a political lobbyist/lobbyist politician. The due dates and payment dates for past support/grooming/investment owing/owed to all of the long suffering benefactors and patrons have now arrived. Accounts must now be balanced.
I’m sure this is not the only attempt to get people out of acute care beds. It may be the first one to make the news. Yet I haven’t seen a single member of the UCP call out Danielle Smith. It’s amazing how many of them can walk around and cash their paychecks when they have no spines.
https://www.contentmentsocialservices.org, the website for the organization that assisted the patient to relocate to the cheap motel in Leduc, has pages and pages of anonymous fluff. But dig deep – examine the Women’s Empowerment page. It’s fairly easy to surmise what direction they are headed next. Hint: it’s not Women’s Empowerment.
What the About Us section does is list its areas of “empowerment:
“Together, we will lift the impoverished out of the binds of financial entrapment by empowering:
The unemployed/underemployed
Young adults who have aged out of foster care
Teen Parents/Single Parents
Outreach Programs
Veterans returning from active duty
Recent prison parolees
Immigrants assimilating to life in Canada
Visible Minority Groups”
No mention of seniors or long term care or health care. Who decided to use their services in this case? Who vetted them? Who got paid and how much for those services? How much was the hotel paid? Who owns it?
https://www.contentmentsocialservices.org/who-we-are
Any relation to this scandal in Sask that Charles Rusnell pointed out?
https://twitter.com/charlesrusnell/status/1769053471578489332
I just have to add that maybe “empowerment” can be done without a licence, but I’m pretty sure caring for a patient in a wheelchair requires training, licences and probably two people with an installed lift that they are specifically trained to use for transfers between bed and wheelchair, plus adequate space in the bedroom and bathroom.
I’m not a health care worker and may have missed stuff.
Sorry to go on but I see they do claim to help seniors on other parts of the website but it looks like they are focussed more on helping seniors stay independent. A good thing if a competent non-profit group were to do it properly, but this looks like a fly by night company out for a fast buck.
Licenced on Nov. 8, 2021 as a general business:
https://opengovca.com/edmonton-business/410422247-002
“CONTENTMENT SOCIAL SERVICES FOUNDATION is a general business operating in Edmonton licensed by the Sustainable Development Department of the City of Edmonton. The licence was issued on November 8, 2021 with licence number #410422247-002 and expiration date on November 7, 2022. The registered business location is at 10526 Jasper Avenue Nw, #202, Edmonton, AB, in the neighborhood of Downtown, in the ward of O-day’min. The status of the licence is issued.”
So would the City of Edmonton have more information?
Licence expired in 2022? Was it renewed?
Connection to other businesses at same address?
Thanks for pointing this out, Valerie. The only project manager associated with Contentment is Mark Smith. Probably too generic to be be THAT Mark Smith, right?
Interesting. Not too different from Marshall Smith.
I didn’t realise there was a former UCP MLA named Mark Smith
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Smith_(Canadian_politician)
He lives in Drayton Valley, not far from Leduc, for what it’s worth.
But Dave points out in comments to his newest post that it is not certain that Mark Smith is connected to the Contentment organization.
This is reprehensible, and that’s clearly an understatement. It is a return to the very bad healthcare policy failures of Ralph Klein, where many people had their lives put at risk. Do the UCP care? It doesn’t look that way.
If you vote ucp you deserve to die.
Brought to you by tbalberta!?
omg. how stupid is this woman. stroke victims in motel rooms????? So what happens if the person has a second stroke and no one is there to deal with it? Does the patient and or their family get to sue.
Given any sane person would know putting people into cheap motels is a model for more deaths do you think Smith and Co could be charged with neglegent homicide or some such thing.
People recovering from strokes need balanced meals, not fast food. Their rooms need to be clean and who is changing the beds of these patients? Are those cleaners qualified to do this work. Cleaning a hotel room is a lot different from cleaning a hospital room. What if the stroke victim’s room is broken into. Its not like they can defend themselves.
Dear old dani, as dumb as they come.
can hardly wait until she does it again but it happens to the “wrong” person. Of course if you have money you could go to a private care center.
A number of people from B.C. moved to Alberta because the cost of housing was less, a lot less. However, one does wonder if they consider it worth their lives.
When you vote people like Dani and company into office, you learn to live with it or die because of it.
It’s only a matter of time before a stroke patient, confused and alone in an unfamiliar place, wanders off and meets an avoidable death. Maybe they’ll get hit by a vehicle. Maybe they’ll die from hypothermia. A motel room is not a secure dementia unit. Dementia patients get strokes, too.
What if a fire occurs? Who will evacuate non-verbal, immobile and paralyzed patients from their rooms? Licensed care centres for the elderly have very specific fire codes regarding building materials and doors that automatically lock when the tire alarm goes off and so on. Are granny-dumping motels concrete structures as required by law?
Do these granny dumps have water temperature regulators to prevent scalding?
So many questions. Could the government be charged for neglect of its duty of care?
Fire, not tire.
“Could the government be charged for neglect of its duty of care?” you asked. He is just an injured old man. Now, if he had been a neglected cat or dog, it might be a different story. We have laws against that. This is just UCP health care policy. Welcome to Alberta.
Marlaina Dani Smith is granny dumping. That’s it.
Do the care providers for the dumped grannies have any qualifications at all, or are they just hired off the street? Have they undergone a vulnerable sector record check by police? It might surprise you to know that even in reputable care homes, staff are sometimes hired as temps from employment agencies without a vulnerable sector check. One such person assaulted a relative of mine.
Imagine going to visit a family member at the hospital, only to find them gone. How about having an elderly spouse who cannot drive and doesn’t own a vehicle? How does one get to Leduc without an expensive taxi fare? How would a non-verbal stroke survivor call for help, when they’re alone in a hotel room with someone stopping by from time to time? How frightening would it be to be left alone if you don’t understand what’s going on? Never mind access to therapists for physio, OT, speech pathology, etc.
Soylent Green is probably coming next in a mandate letter from Our Lady of the Undead. The UCP’s unwanted will be vanished. Problem solved. Promise kept. No one will dare to say a thing.
Excellent reference to Soylent Green! Full marks from the Alberta judge.
So instead of hallway medicine we now have hotel health care, which really isn’t care at all. In fact it is even worse.
If something bad happens and someone dies or has permanent damage to their health, would the organization that put them there be liable and sued? the hotel?
The answer Smith gave in 2022 was her usual glib, not very thought out, response. It should not become the foundation for government policy, but obviously someone took what she said too seriously and has tried to implement it. This alone is one reason why those in power or who aspire to power should be more careful and thoughtful in what they say.
One of the biggest reasons for the shortage of hospital beds in the Edmonton area is no new major hospital has been built since the 1980’s, while population has doubled. And it is the UCP that has delayed construction of a new hospital.
No number of hotels, or pretend pharmacy “clinics” will fix this fundamental problem. It will continue to get worse until the UCP deals with the real problem with real solutions.
Dani is trying to provide Motel care, which is worse than Hotel care.
I recall that the retort mentioned to Canadians who were running off to the greener fields of the U S of A was “Don’t get sick.”
It seems that these days in Alberta, the provincial motto should be Don’t Get Sick … or Educated … or anything that smacks with a hint of civilization.
It looks like the so called Medicine Line has just turned into a trapezoid.
I can hardly wait until question period this afternoon to see the fireworks that erupts from this one! It begs the question: why spend hundreds on millions on a new south Edmonton hospital, when you can be at $47 at the hotel, which includes heat, electricity and water? Is this part of the new care for Albertans model? We certainly hope not.
The problem of non-acute patients occupying acute care hospital beds is a very long standing one. In 1982 I was a patient in Foothills hospital with a broken leg.
During my entire 10 day stay, an obviously demented elderly woman was parked in a chair next to the nurses station. One of the nurses explained to me that she had been admitted for some medical reason and her stay was long enough that she lost her place at her long term care facility. Thus she was being housed in an acute care hospital until a long term care bed became available.
Then, 30+years later I had two elderly relatives who were living in an independent living apartment, had a medical episode which required hospitalization, then their medical episode also caused their overall health status to deteriorate enough that they needed long term care. Since no LTC bed was available, they too occupied a hospital bed for 3 months. The problem is common enough that hospital staff actually have a name for patients in that situation: bed blockers.
The positive side of bed blockers is that, since they do not require the same level of care as acute care patients, hospitals can maintain a reduced level of staffing. What our smartest person in the room premier (as she sat alone in a broadcast booth) didn’t consider when she solved the bed blocker problem by sending them to a Leduc motel, was that she doesn’t have the personnel to properly staff hospital wards if they are filled exclusively with acute care patients
What is most distressing is that politicians are ignoring a slow moving huge problem, aging baby boomers. It hardly takes an advanced degree in demographic studies to figure out that baby boomers are going to put a huge strain on long term care facilities in another 20 years. The ideal would have been to have the baby boomers contribute enough taxes, while they were in their earning years, to build the LTC facilities they will eventually need, but that didn’t happen.
Politicians and pundits like to talk about irresponsible levels of spending, but they also need to acknowledge there is also a concept of irresponsible levels of not spending.
“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.” — Jason Kenney
The warnings about the Gray Boom were sounded 40 years ago and even more intensely in the past decade. Did anyone listen? No, of course not. Successive governments kicked the can down the road and now here we are. This is what happens when the only future that matters is a four-year term.
The Smith government has decided not only to kick the can even further down the road, they’ll kick seniors to the curb. They agree with Jason Kenney: seniors should respectfully die on the government’s schedule, if not before. That’s where granny-dump motels come in. Soon, the UCP might start issuing mandatory incarceration notices on seniors’ 82nd birthdays. We didn’t think the Compassionate Intervention Act was only for drug and alcohol dependency, did we? Think of all the other subgroups of society this could encompass. Think of the Soylent Green!
Thank you for the column, DC! Ah yes, motels for health care. An old, and very bad, idea. Some (old) readers may recall the plight of mental health patients in California under the governorship of Ronald Reagan (1967-1975). As a test run of Reaganomics the governor took charge of, and badly distorted, the “deinstitutionalization” of long-term mental health patents, It was a cynical attempt to co-opt the civil libertarian movement that wanted to replace institutional with community based care. Reagan was all in favour of shutting down publicly operated and funded (unionized) institutions, but replacing them with publicly funded community care was not in his game plan. And yes, many of the “deinstitutionalized” patients were housed in motels, with little access to health care, personal care or recreation. This was well documented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Emplyees (AFSCME), a public service union, in its 1975 publication “Out of their Beds and Into the Streets”.
Hello Dave and fellow commenters,
I echo my fellow commenters views that this incident raises serious health concerns. The public needs to know how this company came to be offered a contract. What were the procedures for choosing a provider, what is the level of knowledge and training of decision makers and of front line staff, what are the provisions of the contract?
I think that a potential transfer of a patient in a hospital bed to a different kind of care should be evaluated by appropriate AHS staff in the first place. If a transfer is recommended, it should be facilitated by AHS medical professionals and trained staff in consultation with the patient, family members, or others, as the situation warrants. It should not farmed out to a for-profit company.This series of events is shocking.
Danielle Smith’s suggestion of placing patients is hotels in completely inappropriate and almost certainly would leave patients at serious risk. Danielle Smith should not have any decision-making power about the medical care of patients.
Were coupons available for the fast food to make it more affordable?
Good question. Since people in government-subsidized LTC co-pay for their accommodation, what were they billed for this ordeal, and what was the government’s portion of the fee? Release the figures!
This zombie will shadow Danielle Smith.
One correction…
There is no such thing as a”former” Fraser appartchik.
She is ensuring that the carpets and drapes match when she gets to the “Heatland” Institute.
I hope you’re right. The Heartland Institute is based in Chicago. They can have her–and Rob Anderson, Barry Cooper and David Parker, too!
Thank you, David. I really am afraid of where our province is going. But, are most Albertans following stories like this? Likely not. As for the “home care” support, it would be useful to find out who is behind Contentment. I agree with your description of their website. After throwing shade at social service agencies who “feed the hungry, shelter, the homeless, provide free clothes, assist single mothers”, it notes a number of their “programs”. Two others caught my eye. One appears to be a “crisis pregnancy centre” (organizations that the American Medical Association and NIH have cited for their misleading and unethical practices; the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada released a study on their promotion practices in March 2023). Under their section on “women’s empowerment”! Contentment’s “A New Leaf” says, among other things, not do let fears give “a different view on the little miracle that is growing inside of us” [“us?] and that “according to young teen mothers, giving up their children for adoption is a form of a bad mother.” They suggest they can provide these teens with 24 hour child care services so they can go to school, work overtime, etc. and that they have certified family counselors. The benefits they say their program provides includes early childhood education, housing services, legal assistance, etc. OMGosh! Also, look at their “A Second Chance” program for orphaned kids, which they say has been operating “for years” in Uganda, Sudan, and Senegal. Who are these people?!?
If Danielle Smith is the smartest person in the room, it’s only because she surrounds herself with fools.
What does America say?
“For-profit nursing homes are cutting corners on safety and draining resources with financial shenanigans − especially at midsize chains that dodge public scrutiny”
https://theconversation.com/for-profit-nursing-homes-are-cutting-corners-on-safety-and-draining-resources-with-financial-shenanigans-especially-at-midsize-chains-that-dodge-public-scrutiny-225045
Holy crap, I thought it was one person who was sent to this hellhole, but it sounds like ten people in wheelchairs.
https://twitter.com/cmcalgary/status/1769873043344822519
hat tip to cm and Charles Rusnell
Definitely a scam operation. I keep thinking of Marshall Smith’s past record.
“The centre was not licensed by Northern Health as a community care facility, and “would not meet licensing requirements for standards of care,” it found.
“Numerous examples of non-conformance with licensing standards have been observed in all cornerstones of the facility and program to include: clinical, health and safety, human resources and business practices,” said the report.”
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2023/08/10/Marshall-Smith-Recovery-Success/
This website for human services accreditation says they have “suspended.” I wonder how long it has said that.
https://www.canadianaccreditation.ca/accredited-org/contentment-social-services-foundation-housing-support-with-health-services-program/
https://www.canadianaccreditation.ca/accredited-org/contentment-social-services-foundation-housing-support-with-health-services-program/
I decided not to report this because it’s not clear to me who this accreditation organization is. I am assuming they’re legitimate, but voluntary. So I’m not certain how meaningful their accreditation is. DJC
Yesterday during question period, the health minister indicated she looked into this, reviewed it with AHS and indicated all proper procedures were followed. I guess we have our answer of motel medicine rather than proper hospital care.
Looks like Adriana is saying ‘it isn’t our fault, it is the fault of the organization we hired.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-health-minister-says-proper-procedures-were-followed-for-patient-taken-to-hotel-instead-of-care-home-1.7147904
But they keep talking about it as if it happened to just one person, whereas I believe Canniff’s son said there were 10 people in wheelchairs in that motel.
https://twitter.com/cmcalgary/status/1769873043344822519
And Lazy LaGrange says they discharge 500 patients daily, so how many are sent to inappropriate lodgings with inadequate care-giving?
https://globalnews.ca/news/10368716/alberta-health-stroke-patient-leduc-motel/?utm_medium=Twitter&utm_source=%40GlobalCalgary
Hello Katherine,
Thanks for your review of the Contentment website. After reading your comments I took a more thorough look at the website. There are some interesting services. Adding to your observations, here is another quote from the site. One service under the heading “Programs” is “Counselling Services and Referrals”. This service includes “Grandparents parenting
Teen parenting
Relationship problems
Out-of-control children and teen youths”
From past reading about organizations that claim to deal with children and teens whom parents view as non-conforming (read “out-of-control”), this kind of wording suggests an organization that may have a semi-religious underpinning and that offers a military-style boarding school environment. I am not saying that this “business” ?religiously-based organization? is like that, but it does make one wonder.
Also, it appears to have been written by someone whose first language is not English.
There are other websites about Contentment Social Services Foundation. It is an anti-abortion organization, among other things. It may provide overseas aid of some kind.
More research on who they are and how they came to be chosen for AHS is needed.
Christina: I wondered if the author’s first language might not be English, too. As noted, I suspect badly instructed AI as well. DJC
Was the motel incident covered at all by the Journal or Herald? I don’t subscribe so was curious.
Lefty: A quick Google search suggests this has been covered by the CBC and The Canadian Press, with a CP story appearing on on the Global News and Edmonton Journal’s sites. So, yes. DJC
“Health Minister Adriana LaGrange, the Mike Pence of Alberta politics”
Why would you disparage Mike Pence like this? He single-handedly saved American democracy!
Well, I suppose it’s not to late for Ms. LaGrange to step up and save Alberta’s. DJC
It’s connected to Mike Smith, the UCP
ZZ: At this time there is no credible proof for this assertion, which I have seen several times on social media. I have seen registration documents for both Contentment Social Services and an entity called the Contentment Social Services Foundation, a corporate entity is listed as the registrant on one and a person named Norton Smith on the foundation. Norton Smith seems to have absolutely no digital footprint. As for the corporate entity listed on the company registration, it is no longer registered in Alberta. So the ownership of the company is not established clearly at this point, and I’m not going to report Internet rumours as fact – at least until they turn out to be factual. DJC
I also checked Contentment’s website and what stands out is that there is no chairman or president listed, no names of board members, no names at. Why would the Alberta government hire a non-profit agency? As others have said “follow the money”! I think I smell a big rat!