Premier Danielle Smith’s pathetic $100 Dani Dollars gambit having flopped miserably with pretty well everyone on Wednesday, Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) plunged ahead Thursday with its previously announced scheme to Americanize public health care by allowing physicians to bill patients to jump the lines for surgeries.
A lot of voters are going to really hate this announcement too, but at least they’re not likely to laugh at it, since it really does have the potential to threaten the existence of public health care in Alberta, and everywhere else in Canada too.
There’s a frenetic, angry edge to the UCP’s characteristic firehose of announcements and pronouncements these days, as if they’ve noticed voters are starting to pay attention to their antics and aren’t liking what they’re seeing, even if the governing party’s electoral polling is holding up for the moment.
There’s also the matter of the RCMP investigation into the dodgy contracts scandal that has dogged this government ever since they fired the chief executive officer of Alberta Health Services in January 2025 after she revealed she wanted to call the cops about sketchy goings on she’d become aware of. It’s sure starting to sound like the Mounties may have their teeth into something real.
All this makes it hard to stay on top of what’s going on, which may help the government when it proceeds with a genuinely dangerous policy like yesterday’s announcement that dual public and private billing for some surgeons would start in September.
The government’s news release portrayed the radical change as an effort “to improve access, expand care options for Albertans, and attract and retain physicians by offering more flexibility in how they practise while maintaining publicly funded care.”
The opposite will be the case. Not only is the policy in apparent violation of the Canada Health Act, which could result in significant funding penalties if the federal government chooses to act, thanks to Canada’s international trade agreements it will open the door to for-profit U.S. health care corporations and their harmful practices.
“There is absolutely no evidence that this will increase capacity or shorten wait times,” said Friends of Medicare Director Chris Gallaway after the government’s news conference yesterday. “It just creates a way for the wealthy to jump the queue, while the rest of us wait longer or are forced to go without.”
“In fact, as Albertans have repeatedly seen, this government’s failed privatization strategy has already reduced public capacity to life-saving surgical care,” Gallaway said.
Of course, that’s the whole idea. The business case for private care is long wait times for everyone with less money. So we can depend on it that if the UCP remains in power, it will ensure wait times increase.
Nevertheless, Surgical Health Services Minister Adriana LaGrange promised in the government’s news release that “we have built strong safeguards and only allowed specified surgeries to protect access to the public system. We will closely monitor dual practice and make changes if needed to ensure shorter waits, more choice and better access for Albertans.”
Her news conference also featured input from Henry Fung, a Red Deer eye surgeon, who opined that “health care needs business principles to make it flourish.” But flourish for whom, one wonders.
Premier Smith and LaGrange keep insisting their scheme is based on European practices. But this too is false, as health care policy researcher Andrew Longhurst has shown. “The Alberta government is guilty of ‘drive-by’ comparisons that decontextualize the complex interactions between public and private financing as well as public and private delivery of services,” he wrote in a report published February.
What the UCP policy and the Order in Council allowing dual practice by physicians are intended to accomplish is to introduce the U.S. health care disaster to Canada in a way that makes it impossible to root out.
Meanwhile, when a group of First Nations chiefs from Treaties 6, 7 and 8 voted unanimously on Tuesday to ask the RCMP to investigate whether the premier’s support for a separation referendum this fall amounted to treason as defined by the Criminal Code, Smith and her supporters responded with fury.
Asked about it at her Dani Dollars presser Wednesday, Smith, obviously overwrought, barked, “I think it’s disgraceful. I think it’s disgraceful that any government that wants to be taken seriously would level such charges that serious against another government. … I would ask the treaty chiefs to check themselves.”
In a post on social media yesterday, former Wildrose Party MLA Bruce McAllister, now director of the premier’s Calgary office, published a snarling attack on the chiefs, assailing them for social conditions in their communities and excoriating them for having “the gall” to criticize his boss.
Also on Wednesday, well known country music artist and reluctant environmentalist Corb Lund expressed his hurt and dismay in a statement sent to media about Premier Smith’s decision to break her promise to ensure his Water Not Coal petition made it onto the ballot this October if he could gather enough signatures.
That all changed when Lund and the volunteers who supported his petition turned in more than 200,000 signatures to Elections Alberta on June 11. It now sounds very much as if the premier’s support for direct democracy doesn’t extend to petitions that might get in the way of Rocky Mountain coal mines promoted by Australian billionaires, even if they do pollute the water all the way to Hudson’s Bay.
“I’m deeply disappointed and shocked by the premier’s decision today,” Lund said in his statement. “After more than 200,000 Albertans added their names to the Water Not Coal petition, and after months of canvassing by thousands of volunteers, to be told that the petition won’t make the ballot because it allegedly missed a June 1 deadline is unacceptable.”
