What the heck got into Rick Wilson last week?
Last Tuesday, Alberta’s minister of mental health and addiction, was responding to a question in the Legislature about an allegation of a lack of transparency at the provincial government’s so-called Canadian Centre of Recovery Excellence in the context of the United Conservative Party’s policy of aggressively shutting down supervised drug consumption sites.
Perhaps smarting from sharp tone of his questioner, Opposition NDP Mental Health and Addictions Critic Janet Eremenko, who had suggested the Crown corporation’s “so-called research is the latest in a slew of torqued reports the UCP has trotted out to justify bad policy,” Mr. Wilson’s riposte took a weird turn.
“Mr. Speaker, I would welcome anybody to come with me to a supervised drug consumption site,” he said. “I was just there the beginning of the week. I’m still having nightmares about this. We’re not helping people there. We are not helping people. …”
“These people that are in there: I’ve actually seen them collapse and die right in front of me. These places are not helping people.” (Emphasis added.)
But as Ms. Eremenko quickly responded, “nobody has ever died in an Alberta supervised consumption service.” And as Friends of Medicare Director Chris Gallaway explained in a news release on the weekend, “no one had ever died in a supervised consumption site in Canada.”
So what’s with this outburst by Mr. Wilson, who has always seemed like one of the more grounded ministers in Premier Danielle Smith’s cabinet of ideological curiosities?
Did he just misspeak himself? In which case a simple apology would seem appropriate. Sooner or later, it happens to us all.
Or has he drunk so much of the UCP ideological Kool-Aid that he’s started to imagine things that didn’t happen?
Or did someone actually die in front of him? In which case, what happened and where’s the police report?
Said Mr. Gallaway: “It is beyond irresponsible to mislead the public with statements like this. He needs to apologize immediately or the premier needs to boot him from cabinet.” Well, good luck getting that to happen.
But as Mr. Gallaway pointed out, decades of legitimate research shows supervised consumption sites save lives and save health care money – even if that may be inconvenient for the UCP given its ideology, the province’s politics, and the influential abstinence-only treatment lobby now embedded deeply in the Smith Government.
“Unfortunately, playing fast and loose with the facts is a pattern of behavior with this government when it comes to their so-called Alberta Recovery Model,” Mr. Gallaway said. “The government has consistently delayed or withheld data when justifying their decisions, going so far as to set up CORE, a government-controlled crown corporation specifically designed to churn out reports that support their agenda.”
Readers will recall that back in 2024, when the Smith Government established CORE, it described its purpose as being “to inform best practices in mental health and addiction, conduct research and program evaluation and support the development of evidence-based policies for mental health and addiction.”
But as we also knew at the time, CORE CEO Kym Kaufmann had already said that the corporation “will help the Government advance the Alberta Recovery Model.” As I observed in April that year, when legislation to create the body was introduced, CORE’s motto probably should be: “Best practices if ideologically acceptable, but not necessarily best practices.”
And, yes, this happened the same day that another member of the province’s Gang of Four health ministers, Hospital and Surgical Health Services Minister Matt Jones, responded to another Opposition question by revealing that the UCP Government is “looking at developing a voucher program where patients who have waited longer than clinically recommended can go to any approved or accredited provider in Alberta and get that surgery.”
Update: ‘Christian Summit’ panned by more than 100 Alberta faith leaders
Nearly 130 faith leaders, representing multiple Christian denominations and faith traditions across Alberta, have signed a “statement of conviction” stating that what’s billed as the Premier’s Annual Christian Summit in Red Deer next week “does not reflect the breadth of faith in this province.”
Well, that sort of goes without saying. A list of the faith leaders who signed and their statement can be found at AffirmingConnections.com.
This is unlikely to discourage our agnostic premier from breaking bread with her ideological disciples.
