Judging from the announcement earlier this week about nine new “urgent care centres” the Alberta Government is starting to think about planning to prepare to build sometime in the indeterminate future, the United Conservative Party’s pollsters must have warned it Albertans are getting tired of the increasingly chaotic state of the province’s health care system.
Alert readers will recall that back on Oct. 20, 2022, during the lead-up to the 2023 provincial general election, Premier Danielle Smith told an Edmonton Chamber of Commerce luncheon that she expected to have a plan to reform the province’s health care system in place in 90 days.
“Just be patient and gentle with us,” she asked her audience. “I know that it’s perilous to try to reform an area this big this close to an election, but we must do it.”
Well, she got the perilous part right, anyway – 1,484 days have now passed and if there’s anything like a coherent plan to fix Alberta’s health care system, it’s not apparent. In the meantime, though, a lot of stuff’s been broken by the UCP.
Monday’s press release said the government would be “investing” $39 million over three years for planning and land acquisition to build the nine new urgent care centres in west Edmonton, south Edmonton, near the adjacent communities of Stony Plain and Spruce Grove, east Calgary, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Cold Lake, Fort McMurray and Sylvan Lake.
That wasn’t exactly new news either. As the government’s press release admitted, the $39-million figure comes straight out of last February’s Alberta Budget.
The facilities will “boost urgent care capacity by 150 per cent and divert up to 300,000 emergency visits a year,” the news release claimed.
“Every Albertan deserves timely, high-quality care,” Hospital and Surgical Health Minister Adriana LaGrange said soothingly in the release. “Expanding our urgent care network will give families more options for treatment, ease pressure on emergency departments and help more Albertans get the care they need, when they need it.”
This is all very well, as long as one understands three key points: Urgent care centres are not hospitals, they’re supposed to be an emergency measure to cope with a capacity crisis; $39 million might buy a vague plan and maybe even some land, but it won’t get anything started, let alone built; and it will be at least six years, and possibly a lot more than that, before any of these places open their doors, as was made clear in during the minister’s news conference in Sylvan Lake on Monday.
Moreover, other than an increase in the funds to be devoted to planning, Monday’s announcement was essentially the same as one made on March 30, 2025. On that day, Ms. LaGrange, then the UCP’s minister of health instead of a mere quarter of a Gang of Four health ministers, said the government would spend $17 million to plan nine new urgent care centres.
So what’s changed since then? Was this just a 129-per-cent increase in the cost of planning in barely over a year and a half? Or does it include the cost of land acquisition for all nine centres, or some of them? This is not clear.
Nor is it clear whether any actual planning has been done since the March 2025 announcement or if the scope of planning has changed. The only real change may be the inclusion of a more realistic number in the 2026 Budget.
Likewise unclear is why Spruce Grove and Stony Plan are on the list. Both are close to West Edmonton and there already is a hospital with a 24/7 Emergency Department in Stony Plain.
Meanwhile, with a provincial general election scheduled for Oct. 18, 2027, we are now moving into the “hot zone” toward the end of a government’s practical political mandate.
This encourages hopeful announcements, but we’re looking at a horizon of more than three years before ground is broken for any of these projects and at least three more years to complete them, so we’re not likely to see doors opening at any of these places until 2032 – a year after the election after the next Alberta election!
Meantime, if the UCP manages to hang onto power next year, they will presumably spend the next four years selling off existing hospitals to the private sector, subsidizing private surgical clinics, introducing U.S.-style co-pays and service fees, letting doctors bill us for timely care supposedly covered by our public health insurance, and inviting us to pay huge private insurance premiums to get minimal emergency coverage.
And there will still have been no new hospital built in Edmonton since 1988!
So other than the fact an election is looming, why was it important to the government to make this announcement just now?
Could it have anything to do with media reports that the province’s physicians are starting to say publicly the system is falling apart before their very eyes, and maybe they need to do something about it?