It’s lot of work to destroy a well-established and popular public health care system, and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith seems to have recognized that reality with her cabinet shuffle early this afternoon.
Instead of one minister of health, assigned the Herculean task of rubbishing the system, plus a minister of mental health and addiction to implement the province’s abstinence-based approach to addiction, there will now be four!
That is, one for each silo in the United Conservative Party’s new fragmented and excessively bureaucratic health care structure – which illustrates, as has been observed here before, that above all her other bad policies, wrecking public health care and smashing Alberta Health Services to smithereens is Premier Smith’s hill to die on.
So former health minister Adrianna LaGrange has seen her portfolio reduced to something called primary and preventative health services – that is, presumably, making life more difficult for physicians and keeping a thumb on public health activities, especially where vaccines are involved. Sounds like it was starting to sink in to the premier, though, that Ms. LaGrange despite her loyalty was becoming a liability.
Meanwhile, former jobs minister Matt Jones will become minister of hospital and surgical health services, also known as acute care; Jason Nixon will have assisted living added to his social services responsibilities; and Rick Wilson will switch from Indigenous relations to the ministry of mental health and addiction.
Moving on to a few of the others, Grant Hunter, the MLA for Taber-Warner in deep south Alberta best known for comparing the NDP to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and visiting Coutts in 2022 to lend his support to the convoy blockaders, was named the associate minister of water, whatever that means. Ensuring there’s enough of it, selling it to Americans, or assuring southern Alberta ranchers that coal mining residues in the stuff are no problem? Hard to say. The government’s news release offered no explanation.
Myles McDougall is new to cabinet as minister of advanced education. In 2020, the MLA for Calgary-Fish Creek apologized for controversial Facebook posts that he admitted were “racially insensitive and offensive, particularly to the Black and First Nation communities.”
Demetrios Nicolaides will have child care added to his portfolio and will get new business cards saying minister of education and childcare. This makes a certain kind of sense, seeing as the UCP seems to view public education as babysitting and little more. Certainly not, you know, much to do with education.
The former addiction minister, Dan Williams, becomes minister of municipal affairs, replacing Ric McIver, whose shuffle over to the Speaker’s chair announced three days ago and the end of the spring legislative session yesterday were described in the news release as the proximate causes of the shuffle. So presumably Mr. Williams won’t be asked any more questions about health care contracts.
Former tourism minister Joseph Schow becomes the Minister of Jobs, Economy, Trade, and Immigration, replacing Mr. Jones. Former leadership candidates and advanced education minister Rajan Sawhney becomes minister of Indigenous relations.
I’m sure there will be more to say, probably much more, about these appointments and the others later. But that’s it for now.
Does this mean all these folks get the extra cash that comes with a cabinet post for the next 5 months before the legislature resumes sitting? You don’t suppose Marlaina is trying to buy loyalty? Or distract from the Corrupt Care scandal? Or the backlash to her harebrained support of the separatist nutjobs? Or the controversy over her husband and the gravy train project? It sickens me that we paying these people to destroy public healthcare and education.
Certainly giving credit to wrecking the health care system could not be given just one MLA, let’s see how many more can jump onto this bandwagon. The trouble is once the privatization is in place it becomes almost impossible to go back, even though operating in house is far more effective and costs way less. The way I see it, the UCP has run out of MLA’s with enough skill to run any of the departments. Remember LaGrange screwed up education, then was shifted to Health where she was even worse. Sadly Smith is going to run a whole bunch of things right into the ground before we can have an election to get rid of her.
Divide and Conquer.
Shuffling deck chairs on HMSmith’s Titanic. The worst part will be that for all the talk about saving money through efficiencies, neither will happen. Think $100M to save $40M at Alberta Lab Services. Nah, these buffoons will declare that the new PM give AB $1B or else they will separate from Canada. Wait, we’ve threatened Carney/ Canada with that already!? Its getting stale to most Albertans, except for the “we want red meat TBA crowd”