The hand of the Atlas Network – the ‘the Johnny Appleseed of antiregulation groups’ – seems never to be far from such efforts
Everyone paying attention to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s ongoing effort to break up and “refocus” Alberta’s public health care system understands that its true goal is to undermine it to the point her government can introduce U.S.-style private health care.
United Conservative Party propagandists may try to fool us with ludicrous claims that what the government is planning is “European-style” health care – it’s obviously not. Ms. Smith was more frank about what she had in mind before she was premier. Albertans should have been playing closer attention.
But decades of empirical health care research make it obvious that the government’s plan to encourage cash-up-front surgeries by private surgical clinics in a province where the supply of medical professionals is limited will speed treatment for a few folks with money but make lineups longer and care unaffordable for many in what’s left of the public system.
To paraphrase Honest Abe Lincoln, you can fudge the some of the numbers all of the time, and all of the numbers some of the time, but you can’t fudge all of the numbers all of the time.
And this is why, sooner or later, advocates of health care privatization and private health insurance fall back on ideology, theories and private greed spun as a fundamental right to justify their policies.
Hard facts, after all, have a well-known liberal bias. So it takes hard work – and networks of funders with access to hard money – to counter them.
Which brings us to a recent effort by a group of right-wing think tanks to encourage Prime Minister Mark Carney to ignore the Canadians calling for his government to enforce the Canada Health Act in the face of UCP legislation that puts the entire Canadian health care system at risk.
A letter from the leaders of six think-tank-adjacent market fundamentalist organizations appeared on the Internet this week lauding the federal Liberal government’s openness to “health care reforms being pursued in Alberta that mirror practices used in high-performing universal public health care systems around the world.”
“It is encouraging that your government has not yet signaled an intent to stifle Alberta’s decision to copy what better-performing European countries do – allow patients to receive surgery in the public system or pay for one at a private facility (including payment through private insurance),” the letter continues, repeating UCP talking points effectively debunked by health care policy researcher Andrew Longhurst.
You can read the letter for yourself, but we can safely assume the signers of the letter are well aware of the pressure Prime Minister Carney is facing to enforce the Canada Health Act to protect public health care, which is clearly put at risk in all provinces by the UCP’s policies because it opens the door to U.S. health care corporations under Canada’s international trade agreements.
In addition to Troy Lanigan, the CEO of an entity called SecondStreet.org, on whose website a copy of the letter can be found, it has been signed by CEOs or directors of five other market advocacy organizations.
At various times, Mr. Lanigan has been president of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, of Preston Manning’s eponymous Manning Centre (later known as the Canada Strong & Free Network), and of the so-called World Taxpayers Associations. “Troy is a member of the Washington DC-based Atlas Network’s Council of Mentors and serves on the board of directors for both the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms and Institute for Liberal Studies,” says his potted biography on the Manning Foundation’s website.
SecondStreet.org, founded by Mr. Lanigan in 2019, describes itself as a public policy think tank. But there is no question it is a leading advocate of health care privatization and marketization.
The other signers:
David Clement, CEO of the Consumer Choice Centre. The Washington-based CCC, according to the DeSmog.com database, quoting DeSmog UK, has received funding from the Atlas Network. According to the University of Bath’s Tobacco Control Research Group, the CCC has lobbied against tobacco regulation in the U.S., U.K. and European Union.
Peter Copeland, Deputy Director of Domestic Policy of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. One of many clones of the venerable Fraser Institute, the grandaddy of Canadian market-fundamentalist think tanks, Ottawa-based MLI is another partner of the Atlas Network. It’s too late to ask, but one suspects neither Macdonald nor Laurier would approve of the use of their names by this organization.
Daniel Dufort, CEO or the Montreal Economic Institute. MEI has been approvingly called a “kind of Fraser Institute in Quebec” by The Financial Post. Maxime Bernier, founder and leader of the far-right People’s Party of Canada is a former vice president. MEI was listed as a member of the Atlas Network, DeSmog says, until 2021.
Brett Skinner, CEO of the Canadian Health Policy Institute. There’s not much information on this Toronto-based organization, another self-described denizen of Thinktankistan. It is not to be confused, though, with the highly respected Canadian Institute of Health Information, known as CIHI. You’ll have to dig pretty deeply on the website of the CHPI’s publication to find out where it’s coming from, but it’s there, way down at the bottom of the page under Mission, Method and Values: “People have a fundamental right to take actions necessary to protect and improve their own health,” says the final bullet point. “Policies that hinder or prohibit people from privately obtaining medical goods, services, and insurance are contrary to the principle of self-preservation.”
Christine Van Geyn, interim executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation. The CCF – I know, that grates – describes its mission as defending the constitutional freedoms of Canadians. “While CCF describes itself as ‘non-partisan,’” DeSmog notes, “it has consistently opposed measures put in place by the Liberal government.” It has historical ties to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and has also been listed as a partner of the Atlas Foundation.
If nothing else, we can see that the hand of the Atlas Network – the Washington-based organization that has been called “the Johnny Appleseed of antiregulation groups” – is near almost every participant in this effort to encourage the prime minister to leave Alberta alone to experiment with ways to wreck public health care.
But that hardly makes them unique.
Thomas Hobbes couldn’t have said it any better:
“Policies that hinder or prohibit people from privately obtaining medical goods, services, and insurance are contrary to the principle of self-preservation.”
When an organization says it is non partisan but always favors one political side, sane people see this. They are only fooling the indoctrinated.
The silence from the federal politicians on this is deafening. Management must have told them to be good little boys and girls and say nothing. It is time for the feds to get off the bench and get in the game. Has anyone considered that Carney remaining silent on this is part of his grand bargain with Smith?
JE: I have certainly considered that possibility. I also think it’s possible the case that Bill 11 violates the Canada Health Act may not be the slam dunk it appears and that for that reason the feds might want to avoid the fight. DJC
That being the case, how long until we start selling our houses to pay off our medical bills to the massive for profit U. S. health care organizations? Ten years, twenty perhaps? This privatization is not going away.
Well then change the Canada Health Act to strengthen it. I believe the vast majority of Canadians are in favour of preserving Canada’s health care system, even a lot of Conservatives. I fear that Mr. Carney is not completely supportive of our health care system and if someone else is working to wreck it (here’s looking at you Danielle Smith) he’s ok with standing aside.
Mickey: I am quite certain your fears about Mr. Carney are entirely justified. DJC
Prime Minister Carney (Captain Canada) is fighting enemies on many fronts, both domestic and foreign. I am impressed by his ability and tenacity. His foes in Alberta salivate when they watch Trump and his raiders rape and pillage in the U.S., and Sam and the gang see opportunity everywhere in Alberta to continue to amass vast private fortunes. Greed will overcome “public service”.
To his credit, during his absences from “Question Period” (The Polliviere Puppit Show), Captain Canada is dealing with the rigours of international politics, defence, and finance, elbow to elbow with the real brains as they forge new alliances and defences.
Captain Canada is our last, best hope at protecting our interests against raging foes in Alberta. Like the pensive pensioner seated next to me, having waited a full year for his MRI (one week with the cash in the private system) said, “they sure are making it painful and expensive to live and die here in Alberta, in fact, they make it impossible to just die peacefully. I wonder what makes the tick other than ignorance and greed”?
Her platform with the Wild Rose party, which she left in ruins, was the privatization of health care. When she campaigned with the Unprincipled Creepy Party, she kept her true agenda hidden from the public, until elected. Then her and all her chicken littles, hamstrung health care, started running around yelling “see we told you it was bad.” and then started to privatize it. I look at the people that signed the letter and they reek of American greed and corruption. The UCP also reek of the same greed and corruption. And all this at the expense of the average Albertans health and well being. This woman, all her accomplices and everyone involved in the America interference of our province need to be placed in a leaky boat and sent out to sea.
Thank you for this very detailed analysis. There is no doubt about where these people are coming from, and what their intent is. Question eight in the October referendum asks “Do you support the Government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to allow provinces to opt out of federal programs that intrude on provincial jurisdiction such as health care, education, and social services, without a province losing any of the associated federal funding for use in its social programs?” Among other things, this clearly about privatizing health care. The referendum is not about separation. That was bait for the lunatic fringe in the UCP as Kenney called them to stop them from taking over the agenda. Smith’s goal has always been to further the interests of corporations. Smith knows that the separation question will be voted down, which is why it is safe to be included. She is saying to the wider conservative base that believes that profit maximizing corporations owned by remote shareholders should be in charge of everything, forget the lunatics and vote yes to these questions. I believe Nenshi focuses on the separation question because he hopes he can convince voters that Smith is a separatist and we will all be so outraged, including conservatives, that we will throw out the UCP at the next election. He is barking entirely up the wrong tree. Smith is not a separatist and voters will not fall for it. The problem is that it is not at all clear where Nenshi himself stands on the question of corporate power.
Smith has been promising to improve health care again and again over the last several years, with little or nothing to show for all she has done. Much of it like the AHS reorganizations and paying more to private health facility owners who have a cozy relationship with her or her party, has likely been counterproductive.
So I am surprised anyone still takes her seriously, rather than laughing their heads off at her latest stupid sign “Delivering more surgeries, faster”, which should be thrown away or recycled. The sign she really should have is “If it is not broken, break it more” because that is what she is really doing. To be fair, some of what she is doing is likely due to incompetence rather than intentional, but it is probably a combination of both.
Of course, Smith is also trying to take advantage of the political environment she created with her separatism referendum initiative and hoping the Feds will have to tread lightly, so she will be able to proceed with more health care privatization now. However, this may only work for a while, so she will have to move quickly or come up with another diversionary tactic later. Although to give Smith credit, one of her strengths seems to be constantly coming up with things to take Albertans attention away from the problems she doesn’t want us to think about or notice.
As a spectator of the Alberta Health Care wars over the last 30 odd years, I’ve noticed a disturbing pattern.
A provincial government brings forward a “market friendly” piece of legislation (and they are all quite similar in their fundamentals), and there is a critical reaction from the media and the public. Once in a very long while, the public gets seriously ticked off, and there are loud and large demonstrations at the legislature, or other significant political manifestations. At this point, the government sometimes backs off, and the furor subsides. The problem is that the government isn’t really giving up, they’re just staging a tactical retreat, and preparing for the next round.
It’s hard to be optimistic about the future of Medicare, with our governments relentlessly working to undermine it, and foreign corporations waiting in the wings to seize opportunities for profit.
Its understandable that the public is unable to sustain long campaigns to fight this battle, that’s not how public opinion and public attention work (not to mention the criminal negligence of our media in reporting on these issues). Thank God for the soldiers at Friend of Medicare, who are tireless in their fight to protect our Health Care System. I wish them every success. They may be our only hope.
Danielle Smith and the UCP wants private for profit healthcare, like their hero, Ralph Klein did, and that does not have a good outcome. Three years ago, we had a provincial election in Alberta, and Danielle Smith was promising to maintain public healthcare. She can’t be trusted at all.
It’s a pretty blatant violation of the principles of universal, single-payer health care, what we are seeing in Alberta. How the Feds can’t step in here is a mystery to me. The Canada Health Act is very clear,
” … the primary objective of Canadian health care policy is to protect, promote and restore the physical and mental well-being of residents of Canada and to facilitate reasonable access to health services without financial or other barriers.”
This is a direct quote from The Parliament of Canada. Danielle Smith’s Bill 11 allowing doctors to
work in “both the public and private systems” sounds pretty benign on the surface of it, but what it means is doctors get to bill both the Alberta Health Care Plan AND charge a fee to the individual patient. We are hearing already of patients in dire need of surgery, in excruciating pain being told by doctors they will have to wait months or years unless they cough up money in the 10’s of thousands of dollars.This sounds like a barrier to me, if not outright extortion. I cannot imagine what kind of doctor, the greed involved, to look at a suffering patient and say that. They should have their license pulled. At the very least they should have their billing number to the AHCIP cancelled. That’s the moral aspect of the situation. But there is also the legal aspect, which somebody has to defend, and enforce. Smith’s UCP government is brazenly paving the way for the Americanization of Canada’s Medicare system, and this will affect every Canadian citizen. Of course, Smith uses the term, “European model” to confuse the issue, and makes up her usual B.S. to obscure the fact Albertans and Canadians will soon be at the mercy of avaricious doctors, insurance companies and “HMO’s” regarding what kind of health care they get, if any at all.
The B.C. Health Coalition along with the Canadian Doctors for Medicare already had this fight (and won) in court with the notorious Dr. Brian Day and his Cambie Clinic in Vancouver over double-billing and taking only patients who could afford exorbitant fees. Interestingly, Dr. Danielle Martin who was very active with the Canadian Doctors for Medicare and a fierce defendant of universal, single-payer health care, was recently elected as MP in Chrystia Freeland’s riding of University-Rosedale in Toronto. Why isn’t she our federal Health Minister? She gave a famous dressing-down to an American senator about Canadian Medicare when Senator Bernie Sanders invited her to speak at one of their hearings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwNy2oOF1rM
She must be beside herself seeing what’s happening in Alberta- is PM Carney telling her to sit on her hands?
The long game that is the complete fulfillment of the neoliberal economic commandments involves the creation of new exploitable markets by, for example, accelerating health care profitization and privatization,
(“During the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) discussions that took place at the peak of neoliberalism’s global spread in the 1990s, Canadian health care was described as an unopened oyster ready for profit-making, just as other opportunities for investment were declining for international corporations.”)
and the reshaping of society and the individuals in it so that “The social citizen should be replaced with the consumer citizen.” by arranging “for the public health care system to become so inaccessible, undependable and inefficient that people feel they are making a good consumer choice by buying services in the marketplace.”
https://www.consultmcgregor.com/documents/research/neoliberalism_and_health_care.pdf
In true neoliberal fashion, there can be no alternative for a society that is being transformed into an oppressive and all encompassing marketplace of “consumer citizens”, because
“The only option is to allow people to use more of their own money to pay their own way . . . It has to shift the burden of payment away from taxpayers and toward private individuals, their employers and their insurance companies.”
I think Carney is much like Nenshi where we want them to say something and they don’t.
But where is PP? He makes it sound like he is Captain Canada, the champion of affordability for Canadians. Where was his comments about the Vax Tax for COVID in Alberta, the cuts to AISH, privatizing healthcare? Nowhere! Not a word! He wants to blame the Liberals for all this when it’s Dingy Smith and the UCP he should be critical of.
FYI, SecondStreet is essentially an off-shoot of CTF (lots of people who were involved there previously). Their ideology is definitely pro-privatization. The data they’ve collected and reported uncovering flaws in the system isn’t overall too bad, however. I’ve been doing a lot of work lately digging up performance stats on BC’s public system through FOI and other means, though my goal is to strengthen the public system by addressing its weaknesses, rather than using them as a way to destroy it. Still, have had common ground on a number of things with some of the SecondStreet researchers, finding some of what they’re doing helpful for my work and vice versa.
I do not think that Mark Carney needs much convincing. He is a deep neo-liberal and judging by the behaviour of his minister of health, it is quite easy to understand private health care is in Canada and will do what it has done all over the world. Of course the government claims that “Not with us” we are better than everyone else. We know well where this is going but not sure it is possible to stop it now. The existing system is so bad and people are done with it and that is what they wanted all along.
The feds will not fight it – do you want to bet?
Considering MLAs and other policians can and do enjoy valet medical services, all on the public dime.
I am reminded of a certain premier of NFLD who decided he’s rather get his rather minor cancer treatment at Johns Hopkins, rather than a clinic in Canada. The services were on the public dime, but the loud outcry for this premier’s rather cavalier actions, caused him to swear that he will pay for the treatment he received out of his own pocket. He had to take out a loan. But this wasn’t good enough. He must resign and be forever banished from the Rock. We should introduce exile or death as penalties.
Private greed is now, and has been since the arrival of Johnny Cabot with a royal patent providing a 20% skim of the looted riches of the New World for the Crown, the basis of social and economic life in Canada. The rubber met the road in 2008 when the comprehensively fraudulent nature of the modern financial system was exposed, and folks who might be expected to know better just went along with the “dog ate my homework” story.
Progs/liberals accept the kookiest rationales offered for austerity and privatization, proving completely incapable of reconciling a socio-economic system that is literally predicated on a “laws for thee, but not for me” relationship, with their infantile notions of democracy.
The world’s most powerful political and economic entity grew, without interruption, from the violent displacement, alienation and subjugation of the populations that existed prior to the arrival of Whitey, to the imposition of a slave-based tobacco and cotton economy in the south, and a small-time extractive fur and timber economy in the north. There was no break, of any kind, from the system that murdered the Beothuks and brought millions of enslaved people to the Americas to the think-tanks of these predators that churn out the nonsense that passes for reasoned analysis today.
You people, and I mean, you people, venerate Tommy Douglas, a supertitious kook who was quite enthusiastic in his derogatory description of communists, the only people who ever actually fought imperialism, colonialism and capitalism, and equally enthusiastic in his praise for the state of Israel, an entity matching Douglas in its kooky and superstitious nature. Here’s a clue. If you actually oppose the inherently violent and oppressive system in Canada, you end up like Ginger Goodwin, that is, shot to death by police. CBC doesn’t run a popularity contest pitting you against Don Cherry.
Your system is owned by people like the Koch brothers and operated by people like the Carny Banker, and somehow, through “incremental” change, you’re going to get a fair deal.
Best of luck with that.
Murphy, I’m giving you a thumbs up on this comment. Maybe a touch harsh on Tommy Douglas because I think his heart was in the right place but yes Social Democrats are a hindrance to real progress…
Amidst all the tearing of hair — and occasionally lighting it on fire — in the dying months of the Trudeau Government over “foreign interference” in our political affairs, from India, Iran, China, maybe North Korea, and Russia, the largest source of that activity was conspicuous by its absence from the public discourse: the Benighted States of America.
US interests have been poking their noses into Canadian politics for decades. The only real distinction between American “foreign interference” and all those others’, is that for most of our postwar history it has been mostly driven by what are known as “non-state actors”: corporations, their principals, and their lobby groups and well-funded “think tanks” — including the aforementioned Atlas Network.
There hasn’t been, to my knowledge, significant US-driven interference in our politics by agencies or organs of the US government proper … unless, that is, you are of the view popular in certain fringes of the left that in the US, there is no distinction between the state and the corporate sector.
This doesn’t mean, however, that this kind of foreign interference by the US is less objectionable than if it were at the hands of that state. In fact, I think it’s worse, because there’s no way our diplomatic apparatus can address it.
FWIW— According to the UCP Caucus ‘summer 2026 newsletter’ for Edmonton …
“We’re supporting major local investments like a Stollery Children’s Hospital, adding a total of 700 new beds @ Misericordia and Grey Nuns Hospital …….etc. etc. (as to who will staff all those extra beds, must be those 1500 imaginary nurses that were hired, what was it, 2+yrs ago)
Also in the newsletter in BIG BOLD form 18 ….the number of laws that the UCP passed this
spring to protect Albertans ….(gag/ woof) with 4 bullet points.
#4 ..establishing new standards for Alberta Whiskey
I am still suffering from the butt-check eyeroll…I have no words.
Randi-lee: Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée Manyberries. DJC