Whatever became of those elusive “triage liaison” docs who were supposed to be a Band-Aid on the crisis in Alberta’s big-city Emergency Rooms while the United Conservative Party Government figured out how to solve a problem that’s the result of nearly 40 years of Conservative policy negligence?
They seem to have completely disappeared … without ever appearing!
Readers will recall that late last year, the dangerous gong show in Alberta’s urban Emergency Rooms was approaching a state of near collapse from the annual winter surge of reparatory illness, undoubtedly made worse by the fact the MAGA-influenced UCP had tacitly discouraged Albertans to get vaccinated against respiratory diseases.
The crisis was particularly intense in Edmonton, where there hasn’t been a new hospital built since 1988, a period during which the population of the city more than doubled. Well, the NDP tried, but the UCP tore up the plans on the grounds, presumably, they were ideologically incorrect.
On Dec. 22, just before Christmas, 44-year-old Prashant Sreekumar died inside the Emergency Room at Edmonton’s Grey Nuns Community Hospital after waiting eight hours to see a doctor about chest pains. The Grey Nuns, as it happens, is Edmonton’s newest hospital, the one completed in 1988.
In the short-lived burst of shock and anger that followed the young father’s needless death, Hospital and Surgical Services Minister Matt Jones got up on his hind legs at a news conference on Jan. 15 and promised that all would be well, the Government of Danielle Smith had reams of plans to make things better … eventually.
In the meantime, though, Mr. Jones told reporters at the newser, a new group of Emergency Room docs would help the triage nurses keep things moving in the city’s packed ERs. (Whether these docs would actually be much help was the subject of some debate, but the consensus seems to have been that more bodies helping out on triage wouldn’t be a bad thing even though triage nurses know what they’re doing. The idea had been tried before and didn’t prove effective enough to keep, but political needs must.)
The triage liaison docs would start “immediately,” Mr. Jones – who is one of the UCP’s Gang of Four redundant health ministers – assured the reporters.
But since then, basically, no one’s ever reported seeing a triage liaison physician in an Edmonton ER. They’re almost as elusive as Bigfoot, it would seem.
So what’s with that?
Near the end of January, the CBC reported the triage docs were supposed to start on Feb. 1, but probably wouldn’t. The Alberta Medical Association was still negotiating with the government about pay and working conditions for the category. “I don’t believe that it will start Feb. 1, but hopefully there won’t be a significant delay in getting it started,” AMA President Brian Wirzba told the network.
Whoops, the Band-Aid program would have to wait a bit, The Canadian Press reported on Feb. 2. “I would hope that maybe by the end of this week or next week we would start seeing some of these positions being filled,” Dr. Wirzba, still somewhat optimistic, told the CP.
Now nearly a month has passed and, yesterday, the CBC reported that a government spokesperson had informed them that “the work to recruit for the triage physician liaison role is ongoing.”
Ongoing? Ongoing where? When the CBC’s reporter asked if that meant there actually weren’t any triage liaison doctors, the spokesperson didn’t bother to reply. I think we can take that as confirmation there aren’t any, though, since no one ever seems to have seen one.
Yesterday’s CBC story went on to say that the negotiations to figure out what to pay the new physicians never seem to have happened at all. There’s never even been a meeting, the president of the AMA’s emergency medicine section told the broadcaster.
“The lack of consistent, real engagement has not made me feel confident that it was anything more than politics to announce something that would fix the problem,” said Dr. Warren Thirsk, cutting right to the chase.
Was Mr. Jones, lately the most visible member of the UCP’s Four Horsemen of the Health Care Apocalypse, just gaslighting us about even the Band-Aid solution he trotted out on Jan. 15?
That possibility certainly doesn’t do much to build confidence in the UCP’s promises of big capacity building programs at some indeterminate point in the future, especially in when the activities they’re actually engaged in all point to continued and radical privatization and Americanization of health care.
Or did he just think he could rustle up a few docs in a couple of minutes, give them all a badge with a new title and send them into the fray?
If so, this may just be another case of a conservative government proving it doesn’t have the chops to manage a peanut stand, let alone a massive health care system with a budget of nearly $30 billion and about 140,000 direct and indirect employees.
There’s a charming belief among many voters that if a party doesn’t have the word “conservative” in its name, it can’t manage the multi-billion-dollar business of government. Every day Alberta’s United Conservative Party government proves this is nonsense.
Alberta’s 2026 Budget will be made public in two weeks, on Feb . 26.
Will there be anything about building a new hospital for Edmonton in it? Don’t hold your breath. Finance Minister Nate Horner is already telegraphing tough times, tough choices, and tough noogies for Albertans who need more public services. Especially if they live in a city that consistently votes NDP.
Oh keep up will you? Triage teams are so out; we’re on to promising ‘classroom complexity teams’! Cue the Stand and Deliver score.
Wasn’t it Vassy Kapelos who asked Nicolaides what teacher in their flaming right mind would want to work for him? (Paraphrasing) Nevermind his saucy little monkey boy reputation. Thanks a lot, Jeremy Appel, can’t get that one out of my mind now.
Anything that the UCP says can’t be taken as the truth. The UCP has a hard time telling the truth.
Your last line clearly out lines the problem.
Perhaps Smith and co. are simply waiting until the province votes to leave Canada and then can take advantage of the great American health care system.
Perhaps it is time to implement a sales tax and use the money for health care only. People could vote on it, like you know a referendum. New hospitals, urgent care clinics, additional medical staff or no extra money for health care and take a chance you die just like that man did.
I understand some of those right wingers in Alberta are also bible belters. Some one ought to tell them when you need heart surgery or cancer treatments praying for an instant recovery is not going to happen.
The UCP now seems to be in some disarray, perhaps because it is unsure how to deal with fluctuating oil prices. After Horner said there were going to be tough times, Premier Smith seemed to be more reassuring. I wondered if they were playing good cop, bad cop and then oil prices also recovered slightly, so who knows what will happen.
Maybe Jones is another one on team good cop, but his failure to rustle up some more triage doctors so far is not a good sign. However, it seems more likely it was only just a part of a hasty political response to lengthy emergency wait times and negative outcomes, including deaths, that was starting to get too much news coverage and attention for the UCP. They don’t seem to like it when their health care bungling gets too exposed.
I am surprised Albertans have indulged Smith and her gang this far with their now years of promises of an improved health care system from their restructuring, when there seems to be no evidence of this happening so far. Perhaps Smith’s recent talk about sovereignty and picking new fights with the Feds has been able to somewhat distract them.
These still missing doctors are a worrying sign that the UCP still does not take our health care problems, many of which they have created or made worse, seriously enough. However, the next time there are bad news headlines the UCP may not be able to get off as easily, particularly if people remember they haven’t done yet what they last promised to do.
The physician liaison triage doctor idea worked marvelously at the addressing the UCP’s top priority: make political heat go away. Now if the media would only leave things alone.
I wonder if the UCP brain trust put much thought into what sort of doctor would apply to be a TLP. Doctors are in such short supply right now that any qualified doctor can pretty much work wherever they want. Why, then, would a doctor want to leave the security of working ‘behind the counter’, where they can focus on just one patient, and spend a shift in the waiting room, where they are exposed to all the illnesses patients are bringing in and spreading for hours, as well as the hostility of people watching their loved ones wait in pain.
TLPs would also be vulnerable professionally. In the noise of a crowded waiting room, a thorough triage may not be possible, but I expect they would still be liable in the event of an error. I assume they could also be liable if a patient had a complication as a result of a prolonged wait. If they are speaking to patients in the actual waiting room, patient confidentiality could become an issue as well.
On top of all these issues, there is also the fact that their position could easily be on the chopping block if a future government decides they need to find efficiencies in the health care system.
In fact, had such a position existed at the time the unfortunate Mr Sreekumar presented to the Grey Nuns ED, there’s no guarantee the outcome would have been any different.
From what I can infer by reading between the lines of publicly available information on what happened to him, it is likely his chest pain was caused not by an Acute Coronary Syndrome (heart attack or unstable angina) but by an aortic dissection. These devastating events can only be diagnosed by a thorough physical examination and sophisticated diagnostic imaging such as an immediate (“stat”) CT scan.
The physical examination to detect this cannot be conducted in a waiting room chair. He would have needed a treatment space with a stretcher to lie upon, and the presence or absence of a “Triage Liaison Physician” could have had no effect on the availability of treatment spaces if they were all full. These was simply no room for him to be properly assessed.
Now, I have no actual, factual or inside knowledge of his case. This comment is based solely on my over 40 years of Registered Nursing experience, including 17 years in the ICU and 16 years in cardiovascular chronic disease care — and inferences drawn from other public commenters on this issue.
When I worked for North American road our receptionist, was experiencing some chest pain, but it was not severe and she wasn’t feeling well, very tired. So she just wanted to go home and lay down.
The company, insisted on sending her to the hospital in an ambulance. When she got there, and they did testing. They discovered that her aorta was either on the verge of rupturing, or it had already torn and was about to completely rupture, when she got there. I hope I explained it properly.
Basically they saved her life. Because she didn’t find the pain bad enough, she figured it was more indigestion and that all she had to do, was go home and lay down and she’d probably feel better.
If not for the companies safety person, demanding that she go to the hospital, she wouldn’t be here today. She would have gone home and laid down and never woke up. That’s what she was told.
The big problem with the UCP is they come up with ideas and never follow up on them, especially in health care. This triage doctor thing has fallen by the wayside just like so many other ideas, like nurse the practioner thing. One of the many challenges I see is the UCP is totally dishonest with Albertans when it comes to the estimated wait time thing. For example, Rick Bell the total champion of the UCP endured a medical episode. He looked and the Sheldon Chumir had a wait time of 29 minutes. When he got there the nurse indicated he would have a far better chance of winning the Lotto 649 than getting to see a doctor in 29 minutes. As it turns out he ended up waiting pretty much all day to get his problem resolved. The other problem is many of these emergency departments only have one doctor working, even in some larger hospitals like the Misericordia and probably others. The best way to deal with that portion is to scrap the estimated wait time garbage, and be honest with Albertans, which I know is impossible for the UCP to even think about, let alone actually do. They need to update in real time: how many doctors are working at each emergency, how many beds there are at each location, and how many people are waiting. This way there is total transparency and people know what they are dealing with. Also it will put pressure on the larger hospitals and perhaps staff their ER departments properly.
The other massive failing with the UCP is with dealing with those fighting addiction. The only way to get quick service at an ER is if you overdose. While druggies and drunks used to primarily hang out at the Royal Alex, they are now taking up ER space at all the hospitals. They should adopt a three strikes rule that if you show up needing care for too many drugs or alcohol 3 times, you automatically need to go for counselling.
In terms of new hospitals in the Edmonton area, the UCP has waffled on their plans again and again. The latest is the new Stollery (which no doubt take more than a decade to build), will ease the burden. Of course then there are the 500 bed towers announced for Calgary, Misericordia and Grey Nun’s which Dingy Smith now has lessened to 350 in her last blathering, which will also take forever to build if it ever happens. All we can do is hope Smith herself gets sick and has to wait ad nauseum to get treated, because things are not going to improve any time soon.
If Smith gets seriously sick, she’d be far more likely to be taken to a private facility in the US than she would be to wait with the unwashed in an Alberta ER.
So there’d be no lesson learned.
First of all I take offense to some of the things that you’re saying about the druggies. There were safe sites in Alberta in Edmonton and Calgary and they’ve closed them. They’ve replaced these safe sites with a app to put on your phone, so that you can call when you’re in the middle of having an overdose!!
What a crock of crap. A lot of these people are loners They don’t hang around in groups. These safe sites had somebody there with naloxone, so that if they killed over right after they injected their poison, that person could apply naloxone bring them back and then they would feel better and move on.
I actually talked to a man that was laying on the floor in the entrance way of the U of A He has severe psychological issues. Sadly because he doesn’t have an address he can’t even apply for help. That’s the rule no address no medical help. And there’s app that that thing has created is just a cash cow and I’m sure if you look into it Telus is probably the one that created it. She has also closed down the U of A walk-in clinic for mental health. That place saved thousands of people by helping them treat in a group setting, for mental health issues which in most cases also included addiction.
That gentleman was laying in the entrance way of the U of A because he was freezing It was cold out there. When I walked into that emergency it was a regular evening. When I went to leave I couldn’t even walk from the door to my daughter’s van without freezing my butt off. He was a schizophrenic but couldn’t get medication because he doesn’t have an address. So he couldn’t apply for help.
So I think keeping them out of this subject would be crucial. Because you’re not being fair you don’t understand anything about what these people deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Secondly the hospitals are running flat out with what they have for doctors. If there’s no beds in the hospital you can bring in five doctors, but if that person is being seen in the emergency but can’t get treatment because he needs to go in as a patient so that they can order whatever additional workups that he needs to fix him. And there’s no place for him to go, what the hell good is that going to do? They only have so much space in the ER for beds. We have seniors that are sick, cannot stay at the long-term care facilities, because they need to be in the hospital to be treated. They can’t go back until they’re better. And they can take up the ER beds. And then there’s those that are recovering from massive illnesses whatever they might be then have no place in long-term care to go to but they can’t go. So those people take up the beds in the ward.
Do you see what I’m saying, do you understand that? You can walk around that hospital anytime and walk down the wards hallways, And you will see hospital beds in the hallways, nurses and residents sitting at mobile computer trays in the hallways, med carts in the hallways, rooms that were built with two beds now have a third bed permanently added, and rooms that have two beds that they’ll stuff a bed in between because there is no place else to go and you get no privacy curtain. When they say 115% capacity that’s not a lie.
The only solution to our problem at this point is a hospital We need to build hospitals and it takes probably about 2 years to do that they’ve had 40 years to build more hospitals. 40 years to put aside funding every month until they have sufficient amount of money to build them. And not one penny was put in any fund to build any hospitals in Alberta.
So for her to give that money to the orthopedic surgeon that happened to be mine from my knee surgery, and he built a real shitty crappy building because the floor wasn’t even level and I went for a nice flight going to see him and ended up bruised from hip to toe on my leg that I was going to get checked out. Is egregious. That money should have been put into finishing the building that the NDP started. Not to put money in his pocket. They also have taken many anesthetists and nursing people and doctors away to work in that clinic. The bone and joint clinic, which is the public clinic but it’s not totally public, can’t even keep up with the people that are going through there. He’s pumping them through like their candy but he’s only taking the easy cases. Anybody that has health issues has to go into a hospital. Just recently I heard he’s starting to work past like 6:00 p.m. And keeping patients a little past that time. But these are not high risk patients.
That is the only thing that’s going to solve our problem. So putting funding into privatized shitty made buildings so that these doctors can all go and work there. Who do you think is going to be available to run our hospitals?
There’s no additional funding being put into creating an incentive for people to get into the healthcare system in any aspect nurses, attendants, anesthetists and whatever else they need. No program for somebody to go oh look at that I had been thinking about this but I can’t afford it. Oh look they’re going to give me, some kind of a grant or funding to help me with the cost, if I go into this field. Okay sold.
We don’t have enough people in any of those positions in healthcare to maintain a two system healthcare system.
With all this separation talk we lost 17 doctors to BC, and now nobody wants to come here They can’t even hire the nursing people they used to pull in from the US, because they’re all worried about us being a gong Show and Alberta trying to separate from Canada. They want the stability from Canada We don’t offer that anymore with what’s going on here. Probably the only place we can get people to come from would be like India or somewheres because they have family here already or something.
In my opinion this government, and this BS separatist crap that’s going on in Alberta is going to be the death of many many more people in our province.
She has no idea what she’s doing and she’s not enlisting in the help of the people in this industry, that can help her achieve what she needs to do. Nope not one bit.
Part of me hopes she never does. Because we need to get these conservatives out of office. But the humane part of me says, no that’s not a good thing, Even if it makes her look good we need to do something. But she’s just not interested.
Sorry David, a little off topic. I wonder if Smith and the UPC are proud of gutting Public Healthcare and Public Education. I wonder if they’re proud of what they have accomplished, with their environmental polices and the way they manage Alberta’s wildlife. The way they kiss the rings of their keepers and rob from people who depend on AISH. Are they proud of the division they have created, between Albertans and will they be proud, when the powder keg explodes and people / Albertans start to get hurt. Something tells me, that they are proud of all this and when it blows up in their face, they will absolve themselves of all responsibility.
What happened to them?
The dog ate them.
I don’t know how the doctors triaging patients in the hospital Emergency Departments would move the sick and injured through any faster, anyway. They might change a priority order once in a while. But, if more actual doctors were hired for the ERs, and the nurses to assist them and care for the patients, and there were a couple more hospitals, and the hospital wards had open beds, with the specialists and hospitalists to do medicine and surgery (and the nurses and support staff to care for the patients) and the public OR’s weren’t shuttered, and there was actual long term care capacity for our frail seniors, and there were primary care clinics with GP’s for everybody who needed one .. you know more actual public health care infrastructure and staff ..all the things people having been telling them for years that were needed- then maybe they could fix the problem! But the UCP just sprinkles pixie dust, or blows smoke, or whatever, when there’s a crisis. “Triage liaison”. Create some mystical jargon. Fancy! It’s French, to boot. I can just see Danielle Smith latching on to that. As the old saying goes, “Bullshit Baffles Brains”. Meanwhile, the situation becomes more dire, the mortality rate keeps going up, and the UCP hopes nobody notices! They’ve taken a world class health care system and completely trashed it. So many dedicated people worked so hard for so many years to get it up and functioning, and then to see it brought to its knees like this is and so many people suffering and dying because of this ineptitude, ideology, and outright malice is absolutely criminal.
The crises of diminishing “health care” not only affects big urban hospital emergency wards, but even more, so many rural hospitals actually close for many hours, even days! So where do the sick of rural Alberta go? Can they get help, and where? This certainly compounds the problems at urban hospitals!
Is there any hope for Alberta and Albertans?
They continually vote against their own interests yet accuse parties which may assuage their difficulties and predicaments as being “socialists” or “communists”.
Thus, we have a province which should have been well insulated from revenue fluctuations due to prudent royalty rates and requirements for remediation being subjected to bleatings from an incompetent government about the need to restrict expenditures in public services.
Don’t worry about the outcome of a separation referendum: Alberta is screwed and, if possible, get out now.
There is no party that is going to “assuage” the difficulties of most Albertans. The Albertans who consider the NDP as socialists or communists are so ignorant that they are beyond redemption. The UCP is a bit like the Maoist CCP, in that it is entirely dependent upon the support of reactionary peasants working with a bureaucratic proprietary elite, and demonstrates a very limited grasp of the technical requirements of an advanced society. The constitutional model that gives this regime control over the second largest oil reserves on earth clearly has a few kinks in it. The de-industrialization of Canada has produced an economy destined for some kind of Soviet Union-style collapse, and it won’t be limited to ‘Berta. I have been reading Douglas Hunter’s, “The Glory Barons”, a book written nearly three decades ago about the Edmonton Oilers. It should be recommended reading for all Albertans as it encapsulates the medieval superstitious nature of the population, as well the nature of our “entrepreneurial” grifter ruling class and the failure of representative democracy to in any way safeguard the interests of the average citizen of this province.
@Murphy,
Some may be ignorant. Most are propagandized, I expect.
Because Maple MAGAS, and Alberta MAGAs just like regular MAGAs are propagandized to cult levels. They’re not forming arguments–they’re repeating slogans. They’re angry but they’re not coming to the source of their anger before they’re being propagandized as to what the solutions, are. That’s done through their functional, but not cohesive, literacy. They’re taught to read and rote, not analyze.
Mao, love or hate him and same with Ho Chi Min, knew he was dealing with illiterate peasants. First thing every agrarian communist/socialist revolutionary does is feed their people then educate them so they have a literate population to govern that can then educate others to join the cause and uh…march bravely into the future.
Albertans are afraid because the Oiligarchs are afraid. Electrical infrastructure is growing by leaps and bounds. The Oiligarchs need to convince the peons that they’re still relevant and will be for the forseeable future. Because as soon as the Albertans realize how much of their wealth has been stolen by these barons through tax subsidies and offshore accounts there will come a reckoning and the Oiligarchs know this.
So they’re stirring up the rage and separatist plots because if Albertans and Canadians ever understand the cooked books they may excoriate the feds but it won’t be the feds they’ll be chasing with pitchforks, first.
This all started when Ralph Klein’s mother Flo told my mother that she didn’t think he was capable of running this province properly and he certainly proved that he didn’t have a clue about what he was doing. Then when he began closing hospitals and cutting 5,000 nursing positions his father Phil said to me Al what in the hell is the matter with that son of mine? While he gives away billions of oil royalties he is making us live without a proper healthcare system. This will cost some people their lives. Phil was right that’s exactly what it did and one was almost my father. I knew of 8 lawsuits launched against Klein for deaths attributed to his health care cuts.
The stupidity has never ended with these Reformers, none of them have ever had a clue about running a province properly yet these senior idiots think they are wonderful that’s how stupid they are. It doesn’t matter how many times they prove that there is nothing conservative about these idiot senior just keep electing them.
I had a letter in the Lethbridge Herald today about what I think about this separation stupidity if anyone is interested in reading it. No one in my world is dumb enough to want it, and I know none of you do either.
Conservatism, once the sole counter to liberalism, could just as well have subscribed to Laotze’s prescription: keep peasants’ bellies full so’s not to trouble their minds with politics, or the popular approval of how the state gets and spends money. When almost everybody lived in the country, differences tended toward the political, such as it was, not the ideological —at least not so much that would distinguished citizens of the general, communitarian ethos.
Science offended adherents to 17 centuries of Christian scripturalism who marked Darwin the genesis of an ideological divide— as unfair to him, a Christian conservative, as it was not to equally blame Hutton and Lyell whose geological refutations of a 6,000 year-old Earth were much more persuasive than the Origin of Species—cells, let alone DNA, hadn’t been discovered yet and the geologists’ evidence, even back then, was rock hard. But Bible-belt conservatism rather preferred to parry with the more-mythological chimera of Darwin’s caricature atop a monkey’s body: its bumpkin constituency—that is, most people— couldn’t much figure science anyway.
Theological appeal was gradually subsumed by rapidly illuminating cities where diverse opportunities unavailable on the farm indulged individual ambitions, the motivating juice of liberalism. Preserving what it could, conservatism fostered the establishment of urban churches to remind ex-rural city dwellers of law and order it expected at the edge of alleged urban iniquity, and insinuated itself into a self-styled community of nouveaux-conservatives whose liberal indulgences had earned them wealth they would now like to keep. All about money, politics subsumed ideology in the realm of public policy. It seems a distant memory today but back then churches were actually anodyne.
Conservatism became the associate of business. Economic growth ensured that sole proprietors seeking to liberate themselves from back-breaking work or bullying factory foremen would keep germinating as profusely as alfalfa sprouts. In an increasingly liberalized, individualized, or non-communitarian society, Conservatism could only carve out a community subordinate to the whole. Today’s alleged
“replacement theory” already happened long ago. Conservative redoubts within this modern diversity became the oligarchy of corporate wealth and the subsidiary of rural poverty.
The most ancient political philosophy eventually had to share communitarian concerns with upstart socialism. The Luddite protest shared with conservatism the basis of preservation and promotion of tradition—this time of weavers on whose behalf Luddites would wreck automation that made hand-weaving obsolete. Liberated middlemen and innovators, however, love a world disrupted: if business is good their enterprises might become big enough for them to join the company of the nouveaux-riche and paleo-Cons, destitute nobs liberated by distant royal relatives who allowed the formation of joint-stock companies. The equation of conservatives with socialists in the communitarian sense equates just as well conservatives with liberals of the gathering industrial age in the neoliberal sense.
Conservative brand loyalty expressed in rural ridings without urban concentrations. Farmers acquiesced so long’s the hollowing out of rural population, accelerated by the Great Depression and WWII, was compensated by deficit financing of automated equipment, by farmers’ inner socialist which organized marketing boards to smooth out economic bumps, and by government subsidy which supposedly right-wing US farmers have availed for decades —that is, liberalism as a political, not ideological expedient (tolerable due only to mythologically high esteem for the iconic ‘independent’ sodbuster).
Tories were left with countering Big Government spending which mid-20th-century events necessitated in large measure. In practice they only ruled whenever voters submitted to parsimony by default after long, tiring stretches of liberalism —like after the Crash of ‘29 or the end of the post-war boom (remind, socialists took advantage of as well). But the need for four times as many schools, hospitals, highways, &c resulting from the Baby Boom could not be denied, so Tories deployed the Red Scare, or ideology-made-simple, amplified retrogressively by theological condemnation of “Godless communism” —which almost worked until the Baby Boom steamrolled it.
The beginning-of-the-end for traditional conservatism began ironically with its biggest successes: Reaganomics, Thatcherism, and Mulroneyism now known as the “trickledown” scam, a clever fabulation of imminent communist threat (in fact, the USSR fell on its own), liberal sponsorship of moral decay (in fact, Boomers paid for their own sex, drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll) and, yes, probably Disco. Yet it was all “Irish Eyes are Smiling” and “Morning in America” and “There’s no such thing as ‘society’.” In fact, neoconservatism, privatization and red-tape-cutting, the theoretical counters to Big, “L-word” Government-spending was instead a public finance, or political, disaster. It doomed the prospect of conservative tradition—at least as far’s we can see.
Moribund Toryism was usurped by neoliberals of the most globalizing kind —the kind that hates taxes and regulation. Rocketing off of trickledown and the Soviet Collapse, neo-rightism was eventually discredited by a series of finance scandals and the big Subprime Crash of 2008 for which it is largely to blame. Its resort to the most base demagoguery indicates its desperation to keep its obscene profits safe from governments. And, as always, that leads to rushing, thence to rashness, and thence to failure.
We look to Alberta for illustration of the end-times for neo-rightism as it plummets backwards into ideo- or theological culture wars. How long can this nonsense go on? The UCP’s literally sickening dismantling of the public healthcare system should, from an objective vantage, be political suicide—that is, in the democratic sense. One can hardly tell if the destruction of democratic government is the end goal or merely the means to something else, but as we watch tRump take a wrecking ball to US democracy and Danielle Smith teeing up a separatist referendum that hardly addresses the outcomes of many, many dysfunctional UCP polices, we have to wonder if government itself is on the chopping block, or if a majority of Albertans would prefer public policy be set in the foreign corporate offices of Big Oil.
I’ve never been a conservative so I’m somewhat immune to nauseam millions of people are feeling right now, but anybody who believes in—or maybe even remembers —what conservatism used to be would, at the mere mention of Danielle Smith’s UCP disaster, surely want to puke.
We, my fellow Canadians, need to pray for our Alberta compatriots.
I have nothing to add to the subject of ‘triage liason’. I am of a 1 st. generation of those who ploughed the soil of First Nations, and fought in two great wars as Albertans. One grandfather who farmed took his respect for Social Credit to his grave along with them. I met Neil Reimer and Grant Notley in a modest office -above a bakery, if memory serves. I was honoured to have tea with Chester Ronning, shared the stage with the great T.C. and many decent political icons. By the time of Rachel’s election, I knew Alberta was transforming into something I would flee and began back than to prepare. Luckily, I have already lived in several other provinces and territories and know I will be welcome anywhere.
The love of politics that once drove me has succumbed to a fear of what Alberta has become.
“The only clue to what man can do is what man has done”.
R.G. Collingwood.
-The the last line is attributed to watching Nuremberg.