Ever since emergency medicine physicians in Edmonton called last Friday for Alberta to declare a state of emergency about the catastrophic condition of the city’s hospital Emergency Rooms, the only sound from Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party Government has been an unnerving silence.
Out here in Wild Rose Country, we have four health ministers. Not one of them has uttered so much as a chirp!
So what are Adriana LaGrange, Matt Jones, Rick Wilson and Jason Nixon up to? Playing a friendly game of hearts, perhaps? Nobody seems to know.
“We’re operating in disaster mode every day,” Dr. Paul Parks told The Globe and Mail on Friday, after the Edmonton group made the call for an emergency declaration under the province’s Public Health Act. Dr. Parks, an ER physician himself, is president-elect of the Alberta Medical Association’s emergency medicine section and a former president of the association. So you can be pretty confident he knows what he’s talking about.
But even if you mistrust experts as much as the UCP does, all you have to do is ask any health care worker about the state of the province’s hospitals generally, and emergency rooms in particular, and they’ll give you pretty much the same answer.
Patients have been left waiting in Edmonton ERs as long as 72 hours in recent days. At least three have died in the city’s emergency rooms, one of them for sure after he’d waited eight hours to see a doc.
“It’s daily carnage,” another ER physician told the CBC. “The overload of human misery is tough to witness.”
“The premier and health ministers have been silent for weeks while doctors and patients are sounding the alarm,” NDP Health Critic Sarah Hoffman said in a statement. “Whether it’s Minister LaGrange, Minister Jones, Minister Nixon, Minister Wilson, the chief medical officer of health, or the premier herself, someone needs to explain what the plan is.”
That canned statement was weak, as NDP communications unfortunately frequently are nowadays. Ms. Hoffman, who did a better job as health minister from 2015 to 2019 than any of Alberta’s four co-health ministers do now, or the lot of them combined for that matter, cut to the chase and made a sharper observation in an interview yesterday. She told Global News, “I think that the UCP is intentionally making it so much worse in Alberta hoping that people will say, ‘Well, then, we have to privatize everything.’”
You have to admit, while that was just a theory, it’s completely plausible based on the UCP Government’s behaviour to date.
One thing that is glaringly obvious is that while Alberta’s population has grown by about 800,000 people since 2019, the UCP hasn’t built a single new hospital in the capital city, which serves as a medical specialty hub for the northern half of the province.
In fact, the last time anyone thought about a new hospital for Edmonton, it was in 2017, when NDP premier Rachel Notley announced plans to build one in the city’s southwest.
“We want to make sure residents in one of Edmonton’s fastest-growing areas are provided medical care as close to home as possible,” Ms. Hoffman said at the on-site announcement ceremony on May 30 that year.
Brian Mason, the infrastructure minister of the day, observed that the new facility would be “the first hospital to be built in Edmonton in over a generation.”
Only it wasn’t, of course. In 2019, along came Alberta’s first UCP premier, Jason Kenney, who, Trump-like, was determined to undo everything the NDP government had done in its four years in power, no matter how much sense it made or how much value it added. The health care crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic was still in his future.
After the UCP’s 2023 re-election, with Danielle Smith at the helm and not a single government seat in Edmonton, the project was in real trouble. Ms. Smith, as was obvious even before the vote on May 29, 2023, was never a leader for all Albertans. But if there was anything the UCP understood, it was revenge. So, on March 1, 2024, Finance Minister Nate Horner made it official in his budget that the project was kaput.
And here we are less than two years after that and the entire health care system is in chaos. Last I checked, residents of south Edmonton were being told to consider driving to Red Deer if they had a medical emergency.
Ms. LaGrange, the former UCP health minister, has been demoted to the primary and preventative health portfolio; Mr. Jones is responsible for hospital and surgical services; Mr. Wilson for mental health and addiction services; Mr. Nixon for assisted living and social services. The only official word we’ve heard since the doctors’ call for an emergency declaration was from Ms. LaGrange’s press secretary, who tried to blame it all on the flu season.
Well, maybe one of the ministers will have something to say later this week. Or maybe they’ll just stand by while Premier Smith turns up the gaslights.
The UCP destroys everything they get their grubby hands on. Ralph Klein’s full intention was to get private for profit healthcare for Alberta, because he weakened the public healthcare system so badly, from gross underfunding. He blew up a hospital, let others get shut down, deprived others of equipment and maintenance that they required to properly function, and gave pink slips to numerous nurses. Many people died as a result. Under the UCP and Danielle Smith, they are finishing off what Ralph Klein started. Turning the public healthcare system into a chaotic mess, and making it ineffective, so it can be privatized. Recently, a person died while waiting in an Edmonton hospital ER for hours. Expect more people to die from the foolishness of the UCP. Medical experts know there is a crisis. Where is Danielle Smith? On another vacation. That’s weak leadership. The MH Care (Corrupt Care) is not going away, and that will obliterate the UCP. Despite that, the damage the UCP have done will take a long time to rectify.
Headline: “Edmonton’s first baby of 2026 arrives at Grey Nuns hospital”. Things are so bad that folks on the internet asked if the baby was born in the emergency department. Dark humor for dark days in Alberta, with no signs of life and light. Just like the 1918 influenza post-pandemic years, when people were afraid of hospitals because that’s where people went to die. Congratulations, UCP. A century of progress flushed down the drain in less than seven years. You gambled with our health and we lost.
Well if it doesn’t involve new pipelines, criticizing the Federal government or a combination of these, the UCP is now not really interested in talking about it.
Health care is in a shambles across Alberta, but perhaps more so in Edmonton which just doesn’t have enough hospitals to serve its growing population. If the problem was the deficit at the time, the UCP later had some large surpluses after and could have then moved ahead with the hospital they cancelled.
It is hard to say if the UCP just doesn’t care about health care or they were just being petty and vindictive this case. Perhaps it is actually all of these. In any event the result is the same, the warnings from people working in emergency health care are becoming more serious and louder. How many more people are going to have to die waiting for emergency care in Edmonton or other parts of Alberta before the UCP deals with this?
Well that’s the privatization plan writ large.
Starve socialized services of funds so they don’t work. Then complain they don’t work so they need to be privatized.
I suspect this was the plan since the inception of healthcare otherwise we’d have federal health care whereby the feds could *order* the provinces to use the healthcare funds, wisely.
Now the provinces blame the feds, the feds blame the provinces and we all hear the loud flushing of the entire system across the entire country.
Thank you for this as always, DC! As you point out, Brian Mason commented, in 2017 that the NDP-proposed hospital for Edmonton’s south side would be “the first hospital to be built in Edmonton in over a generation.” Entirely correct. The last new hospital to be built in Edmonton was the Grey Nuns, which opened 38 years ago in 1988. Grey Nuns opened under the Progessive Conservative government of Don Getty, in other words nine premiers ago. When the Grey Nuns opened, Edmonton and area’s population was about half what it is today. While there have been some health “centres” opened since 1988 they do not have hospital beds. There has been a net decrease in psychiatric hospital beds in Edmonton since 1988, yet Edmonton is the psychiatry centre for half Alberta and the entire Northwest Territories. In short, while the NDP took steps to address the crisis in 2017, the crisis itself has been the carefully cultivated creation of decades of PC and UCP cancellation and neglect. A solution, if any, is at least a decade into the future. New hospitals require land acquisition, infrastructure, construction and staffing. And billions of dollars.
Margaret Atwood nailed it years ago. “Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.’
The UCP is a branch of the US Republican Party. They’ve refused to diversify the Alberta economy and every time the price of oil drops, we suffer the consequences. Alternative energy expansion is shackled by regulations while “orphaned” well sites continue polluting the environment and Albertans are expected to clean up the fossil fuel industry’s mess. When it comes to human rights, well they are “notwithstanding” and crushed to meet a severely conservative agenda. With crumbling infrastructure and in adequate health and social services, this government ran the “Alberta’s Calling” ad campaign, which enticed about 800,000 people to migrate here and find it hard to find a decent job, a doctor or a social worker. The additional strain on Alberta’s Health Care and Social Services sectors hasn’t been met with additional staffing and funding. The UCP had got to go.
I think Hoffman’s theory is fairly accurate. Scary, but accurate. And I’m still wondering why this government needs 4 Health Ministers. It seems all the little UPC piggy’s are lined up at the trough, at the expense of Alberta Taxpayers.
It looks like Matt Jones would logically be the one responsible to declare an emergency; I wonder if he has realised that? Is he around?
Mistrust of experts? That is their strategy to do nothing so they can destroy the system more to the point of rupture.
Jason Nixon is now in Health? Wow, I would not trust my biggest enemy to this ‘EXPERT’. WOW we are in deep shit.
Carlos: I agree.
This Alberta Politics page is ridiculously biased in favour of the left in every article I’ve ever read. Makes me choke on the disinformation and slanted coverage on every topic it covers. Not sure who is funding it, but so obvious that there is no interest in journalistic integrity here
Glad you’re enjoying it so much, Jac. Please continue to come back again and again and boost my readership numbers. It does wonders for the modest ad revenue the blog produces. Aside from that, a few donations from regular readers – you’re welcome to make a donation, of course – and me, no one is funding it. Certainly not the way corporate interests finance right-wing “news” sites and “think tanks.” This is a commentary blog with a clear point of view, so lectures about “journalistic integrity,” which I surmise from your comments means publishing opinions in line with your own, are not very meaningful. DJC
Plus David has more journalistic chops than all the right-wing “news” sites put together. He brings receipts, not just BS.
Thank you, Val. DJC