In a back-handed admission that Alberta’s hospital Emergency Rooms are in a colossal mess, the CEO of one of the United Conservative Party Government’s confusing tangle of new medical bureaucracies said in a press release Monday that there will be “a province-wide response that has seen all sectors of the health-care system cooperate to create capacity and free up resources.”
So what was the point again of Premier Danielle Smith’s expensive project to break Alberta Health Services into itty bitty little pieces?
In his press release, Acute Care Alberta CEO David Diamond promised that the new bureaucracy he heads “is working with service providers like AHS and Covenant Health to support site-level decisions such as accelerating discharges and transfers where appropriate, limiting non-essential inbound transfers, dedicating 336 beds specifically for respiratory virus season, and opening designated surge spaces to manage increased demand.”
Albertans can be forgiven if they are not particularly reassured by this kind of bafflegab.
Mr. Diamond’s press release appeared to have been drafted in response to a weekend statement by Alberta Medical Association President Brian Wirzba in support of the pressure being put on the government by front-line physicians in response to the appalling conditions in Alberta’s Emergency Rooms.
“The first step is restoring system resilience by re-establishing clear accountability for provincial operational integration,” Dr. Wirzba said in his statement. “This includes confirming provincial health agency accountability for patient flow and surge capacity within and between care-delivery corridors and across service providers.”
In other words, pretty much what we had before the UCP started to bust up Alberta Health Services because our antivaxx premier blamed it for public health measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Loss of this capability has significantly contributed to today’s crisis,” said the leader of the physicians’ collective bargaining and advocacy association, in what surely is the first major understatement of 2026.
Evidence of the crisis, Dr. Wirzba said, includes the fact Alberta hospitals have run at 110-per-cent capacity for more than a year and the number of patients walking out of Emergency Rooms without being seen is up 77 per cent since 2019, the year the UCP came to power.
Mr. Diamond’s release suggested that the current chaos in Alberta’s Emergency Rooms, where patients have been known to wait up to 72 hours to see a doctor in recent days, was just a result of “a particularly challenging respiratory virus season, which has placed considerable pressure on our emergency departments.”
This is essentially the same excuse trotted out by the press secretary to Primary and Preventative Health Services Minister Adriana LaGrange, the most senior of Alberta’s Gang of Four health ministers, although more diplomatically worded.
“Albertans can be assured that the Government of Alberta, provincial health agencies, and service delivery organizations are working together to actively support the acute care system and meet the daily pressures and high demand,” he added, not really very reassuringly.
Mr. Diamond noted that Recovery Alberta, another of the UCP’s welter of easy-to-privatize health agencies, “has made six beds available for additional surge capacity, with an additional six more to come.” Is it just me, or does this sound unlikely to do much to help meet the crisis in ERs so crowded everywhere in Alberta by literally thousands of patients that they have just about collapsed. Oh well, every little bit helps, one supposes.
Mr. Diamond claimed in his news release that respiratory virus hospital admissions peaked on Dec. 28, a claim that had an echo in the news conference yesterday by Alberta’s new and approved chief medical officer of health, Dr. Vivien Suttorp, who was cautiously somewhat less definitive in the implication the winter wave of respiratory infections has passed.
Dr. Suttorp noted in her newser that Alberta’s immunization rate for influenza is only 19 per cent, and that 74 per cent of the more than 500 people still hospitalized for the disease were not vaccinated. Presumably that can be chalked up to the success of the UCP’s vaccination suppression strategy. On New Year’s Eve, more than 700 Albertans were in hospital with the flu.
Meanwhile, there are 118 patients in hospital with COVID (Alberta vaccination cost, $100 per shot), Dr. Suttorp said, plus another 85 with RSV, as respiratory syncytial virus is commonly known.
Presumably we’ll be hearing from Mr. Diamond again tomorrow, when Acute Care Alberta is expected to have a news conference. Maybe someone will explain why Edmonton’s ongoing ER crisis has nothing to do with the fact a new hospital hasn’t been built in the city since 1988, when the population was 576,249.
The Alberta capital city’s population is now estimated to be 1.24 million and that of the metropolitan area to be 1.6 million.
With the exception of the period from 2015 to 2019, the province has been governed by Conservatives. Premier Rachel Notley’s NDP Government announced in 2017 that a new hospital would be built in south Edmonton, but the UCP pulled the plug on that project once they were in power.
We have a big mess under the less than credible leadership of the UCP. The damage they have inflicted upon Alberta is so widespread, that it might be impossible to even repair. The UCP have to be gone, no ifs ands or buts about it. This isn’t leadership, it’s an epic failure of a government. Yet, Danielle Smith is on vacation. On top of this, there still are people who believe that the UCP and Danielle Smith are absolutely wonderful.
“impossible to repair” ?? If it was done by man, or in this case UCP weasels, it can be undone by decent people. In a Parliamentary system, notwithstanding fascist propaganda, if it is physically possible, there is really no restriction on what a government can do.
Caron: The damage the UCP has done is immense. If that damage can be repaired, it is going to take a very long time.
I don’t know. Assume, ad arguendo, that the Nenshi-led NDP upsets the UCP at the next election in the fall of 2027 and forms a majority government. A new Minister of Health — one single Minister for all of the health portfolio, not a “gang of 4” as we have now — is given the job of repairing the damage done by eight years of UCP misgovernance. Does he or she undo this blowing up of the system and re- establishing Alberta Healthcare Services? Or turn back the clock to before 2009 and reinstate geographically-defined Regional Health Authorities? If the latter, do they carve out provincial health resources such as the tertiary & quaternary care referral institutions of Edmonton and Calgary, and manage them at a provincial level? Do they abolish the standalone parallel Catholic system?
Or, given how heavily politicized everything to do with health care always is, do they abandon all pretense of arms’-length management and operations and simply bring the entire system, lock, stock & barrel, under the direct aegis of the Ministry of Health?
Or, in recognition of the need for organizational stability after years of upheaval, do they decide to leave things largely as they are, but use the reunification of the Ministry to drive improvements in collaboration and interoperability between the “pillars” of the health system they just inherited?
I don’t know that completely unscrambling the eggs is the answer. They might be too far along in their cooking for that to work.
The UCP seems to be now trying to reassure us the less coordinated system they set up will somehow be moving forward full steam ahead. However, a late communications push really is not a substitute for so much earlier poor planning and policy.
Behind those words are they even now beginning to realize why it was not good idea to discourage and make vaccinations so difficult? Oh, if only someone had warned them of the consequences of their decisions!
However, I’m not sure anywhere in their carefully worded statements there is yet a sense so far that the UCP accepts any responsibility for the mess they have created, or that they have really learned anything from it. While we hope things will not get worse, a decade will be lost while Edmonton continues to grow without a new hospital, even if they change course immediately, which seems unlikely.
So we will have to hope that finding a few beds here and a few beds there will somehow magically fix what are really much bigger structural problems. No, shuffling the deck chairs around some more and the communications equivalent of playing some upbeat music is just another distraction, what is needed now is a change in direction.
The UCP keeps telling us they are somehow fixing health care, but things seem to not improve and get worse. At some point the public is going to see the credibility problem here. We are way past the point where some more reassuring words will solve the problems.
In other words…
Stick a band-aid on that broken arm, throw unhoused pneumonia patients back out onto the street with a bag of antibiotics and tell patients with chest pains to go home and gargle baking soda.
Pay another bureaucracy but no money for increased medical care.
Streamlining. YAY!
It would be so refreshing if Smith would just admit that Edmonton will not be getting another hospital until they start voting for the UCP.
Sadly, despite what Smith has done to health, education and welfare, if an election were held tomorrow, Smith and the UCP would most likely win and that tells you all you need to know about the majority of Albertans.
Jaundiced Eye: The UCP will not be in power for much longer, because their corruption is ending them. However, the damage they have done is going to be very difficult to repair.
Albertans remind me of Americans, suckers and losers.
The excuses the UCP is trying to pass off are totally ridiculous. There are so many examples of lack of effort by the UCP related to ER’s and I can add a few. Remember flu season hits us every year, just like Halloween or Christmas. This can be predicted yet it hits with the UCP unprepared every year. Four and a half years ago, I had a heart attack and waited 12 hours at the U of A before I was admitted. Fortunately I didn’t die in the waiting room. The reason was the ER was inundated with the stupid anti-vaxxers that refused to get the COVID shot and ended up with COVID. In September my wife’s knee swelled up and we went to the new Misercordia ER and only 16 rooms were being used. The wait was over 10 hours to see a doctor and was not during the flu season. Meanwhile 40 or so new beds in the ER were ready but not used as there was no staff. The new ER was opened almost 2 years before that, so Covenant could not or would not staff the extra beds resulting in excessive wait times for no good reason. So this under performance started when the UCP were elected into power and has continued for the last 6 years. It also has nothing to do with the flu season. Now that they announced a new Stollery, it will be at least another 10 years before that will be done and by then will have little or no impact on the poor state of health care.
I heard the CMOH suggest that Albertans take steps to ‘protect’ themselves but I’m sure I never heard them utter the word vaccinate once.
Martin: In Alberta, the V-word is Verboten. DJC
The Smith System of health care has basically collapsed, perhaps as it was always intended to. Smith’s pie-in-the-sky promises have amounted to nothing except increased costs and chaos. As for the worn out excuse that this is all due to a severe influenza outbreak this year, shouldn’t a health care system be able to deal with a health care event that Smith, herself, minimized during the pandemic? She argues we should not get too worked up about COVID as it is pretty much the same as the flu. Now the bosses of the new Smith bureaucracy blame the flu for bringing her system to its knees. Nevertheless, this is definitely not an emergency in her eyes. Perhaps her view from the skybox is clearer than ours. You can see the next demand on taxpayers will be to fund a pipeline. Surely that will fix all our problems. Unfortunately, affordability won’t be addressed because of the big deficit the UCP is running.
If only 19% of Albertans are “immunized” then 81% are not. If 74% of currently hospitalized flu patients are unvaccinated then 26% are vaccinated. This is a similar trend to that observed with the Covid data in Alberta in early 2022 when it was pulled from the Alberta Health website. The numbers in both instances are too small to allow meaningful interpretations, but perhaps that fact is significant in itself.
In 2020 I was in a hospital in Edmonton awaiting for surgery. I had kidney problems.
My roommate was a farmer and his story made my blood boil. He lived 21/2 hours from Edmonton and on three previous occasions he had been told to come to Edmonton to have his cancer surgery. He was told to be at the hospital by 6am so he decided to come the day before and stay in a hotel. In all three cases when he got to the hospital there was some sort of excuse for them not being able to do it and was told to go home and wait to be called back.
This forth time he had finally been admitted and when they came to get him at 6am I wished him well. He was back shortly thereafter and I learned that they had decided his cancer was too far advanced and they could do nothing for him.
I will never forget his wife , son, and daughter bawling their eyes out in our room. His son was 17 and he told me that he couldn’t run the farm by himself and still go to school. I asked if there were neighbours who could help him and he didn’t think so.
The final straw was when a doctor came in and told them that if they could have removed the cancer sooner he may of had a chance.
However knowing the mess the health care system was in thanks to these Reformers who had almost killed my father by sending him home too soon after mayor surgery I wasn’t surprised.
The UPC is anti-vax and they achieved a 19% flu vaccination rate and now it’s biting them in the arse. But just look at all the money, Smith and her merry little breezes saved in Flu shot costs. And just think how much better Alberta and Albertans will be off, with healthcare being completely privatized, as long as your drivers license says you’re a good citizen and your allowed access. I personally feel blessed to have Smith’s under the table partners looking out for my best interests. In the words of the great Charles Brown, “Oh good grief!”
On September 23, 2023, newly elected Calgary Mayor Jeromy Farkas published an opinion piece in the Calgary Herald.
Read it if you live in Calgary, or Alberta, or want to know how professional ultra conservative political power succeeds.
Mayor Farkas, who says he is openly bisexual in the article, thanked a teacher for averting his thoughts of suicide when he was a child.
We Calgarians will see what his mayoral political power will result in.
While Farkas says minimal municipal tax increases for this year, his desperation for being liked by the Premier Danielle Smith UCP gang seems apparent. Calgary may defer taxes for this year, next year.
But the next mayor voted into office in Calgary will have to fix the financial mess Mayor Farkas created.
That is, if Calgary wants running water and other things, like public schools and hospitals.
Staffed with committed hard working professionals.
I know of an oral surgeon who told a politician who wanted his daughter seen before other people, to wait his turn. All politicians, especially UCP should be placed in the same way. However, there are always ‘good chaps’ around to help out the very needy (nerdy) UCP who have brown noses and no character. Of course Mrs. Smith will take off to the good old USA for care at tax payers’ expense.
Hello DJC and fellow commenters,
Although this is on a different subject, it still relates to Danielle Smith’s plan to take control of everything. Danielle Smith says that, since the failed water main in Calgary was supposed to last a hundred years, the failure is the fault of the City and, therefore, she will take on oversight of the Calgary water system if she gives any money to the City to build a new water main. This is an excuse to control the City and, presumably, she will extend control to other cities and towns. If Danielle Smith looks after Calgary’s water system the way she looks after Alberta’s health care, I think that we are in for disaster and, quite possibly, privatization.
Since Danielle Smith is so fond of the way things are done in the U S, opening the door to U S style expensive health care insurance, for example, does that suggest that she will be planning to divert water to the U S now or when she is able to move towards making Alberta a part of the U S? Perhaps, this a far-fetched idea, but I think that it is likely that Donald Trump covets Canada’s water along with our natural resources when he talks about Canada as the 51st state. And Danielle Smith is all on board with Alberta as the 51st state.
She is allied with the US special envoy to Greenland, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry of Louisiana. She has had three weeks to distance herself, denounce the US imperialists and their lawlessness and withdraw, but not a peep. Maybe she’ll be governor of Greenland and Canada AND Panama. A Panama hat trick!
https://www.desmog.com/2026/01/14/danielle-smith-working-with-trump-official-who-wants-to-annex-greenland/
https://www.wafb.com/2026/01/15/gov-landry-heads-washington-greenland-envoy-meetings/
For now, she’ll stay in her Tropico hidey-hole paradise as her minions work to seize control of Calgary’s water supply, privatize it, give it free of charge to foreign data centres, charge exorbitant user fees to the peasants and move it to the US border in flagrant disregard for international water treaties and federal authority. Let the wildfires burn. You can’t throw a precious resource like water on the flames of whatever will be left of Alberta. Did I miss anything? Oh, yes. Soon the peasants will find out those oil royalties are in tank farms, not cash. But first, a provincial election before the whole place collapses. Gotta give it to would-be dictators. They have almost manic levels of energy for world domination.
So far the (allegedly US-funded) separatist movement is going according to plan. They’ve only been kicked out of a few meeting places and taken their battle to a gun shop, appropriately named after the symbol of the US Democrats (?) or moose if you wish, because why not? They’re now demanding that any companies with “Canada” and “Canadian” in the name substitute “Alberta” and “Albertan”. Never mind that little issue with the Law Society, qué?
So who’s going to stop Madame Présidente du Canada, la jefa, whatever? The donkeys are in charge now. Back to the swamp, donkeys!
I forgot to mention another title for la jefa: Queen of Canmore.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/canmore-livability-tax-9.7036447
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/canmore-trails-plan-9.7031417
Perhaps we’ll see a castle built on the banks of the Bow so the kings can extract tolls from the ships that wish to enter the Øresund strait. Alas, poor Yorick!
I am tired of the UCP nonsense. More like a little disgusted.
Tired of the kowtowing to the Take Back Alberta goup. Danielle Smith’s Government appears to be abandoning good Government in an attempt to put forward the policies of this far right wing group that does not appear to have the intestinal fortiture or confidence to offer up their own candidates for election under the TBA banner.
By any stretch of the imagination I should be a UCP supporter. Family backgraound, career, socio ecomonic status. You name it.. I (and my spouse) tick all of those boxes.
We find the notion of putting our X beside the name of any UCP candidate repulsive. Danielle Smith and the group the influences her have completely turned us off. From supporting through to financial support.
It saddens me. It has been done at the expense of good Government. AHA, CPP, RCMP, Alberta separation, anti science…you name it.
Unbelievable as it may seem, I find myself in the position of not even willing to vote UCP in the next election….regardless of our local candidate. And for me…the election cannot soon enough before more damage is done by this group to our great Province of Alberta.
The current UCP elected toadies are nothing short of a group of self serving carpetbaggers.