Alberta NDP leader accuses Kenney of damaging province’s public health care ahead of budget day

As Alberta gears up for budget day next week, NDP leader Rachel Notley is accusing Premier Jason Kenney of permanently damaging Alberta’s public health-care system by funding and supporting privatized health care.

At a Friday news conference, Notley said the UCP government is “going to attempt to use their own failures” as an excuse to “carve and hollow out” public health care in the province. She also accused Kenney of divisive rhetoric by attacking health-care workers who have worked tirelessly throughout the pandemic.

“The UCP started a war with doctors, threatened to cut nurses’ wages and then threatened to fire 11,000 frontline health-care workers. There has not been a single health-care setting or health-care worker that they haven’t systematically destabilized or demeaned,” said Notley.

Notley’s call comes after the premier posted a video on Twitter on Friday where he provided a preview of what is being tabled next Thursday. In it, he said the UCP government is committed to building health-care capacity to treat more patients, saying the expansion will help address future surges of COVID-19.

“We’ve got to learn to live safely with COVID-19 without the need for damaging restrictions that limit our personal freedoms and hurt our economy. And that means having a health-care system that can quickly handle any future surges of the virus,” he said in the video.

Calgary registered nurse Erin Boyd said privatized health care will only benefit a select few and will create barriers for people who want to access care. She also said front-line health-care workers are suffering from extreme burnout and exhaustion as a result of Kenney’s response to the Omicron variant.

“Everything that he has done during the pandemic has been for their political gain, rather than focusing on the health and welfare of Albertans. Privatization is no different,” she said.

“Now is not the time to dismantle our public health-care system.”

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This isn’t the first time Kenney has considered private health care for the province. Privatized health care was part of his party’s health platform during the 2019 provincial election. At the time, Kenney said the UCP government would work to reduce bureaucratic bloat in health care and explore private options.

“We’re open to that kind of common-sense competition. We’re not going to let ideology get in the way of our focus, which is timely patient care,” he said.

The UCP also voted to approve a policy that supports creating a privately funded and privately managed health-care system at its 2020 annual general meeting.

“Health care is the greatest budgetary expense. Recent events have shown how vulnerable the system is to demand fluctuations on it,” the policy says.

As a result, Kenney’s government cut thousands of Alberta Health Services jobs in October 2020 in an effort to save hundreds of millions of dollars. Tyler Shandro, who was the province’s health minister at the time, said most of the losses came from labs and laundry services which were already being outsourced.

“Quite frankly, by the time the pandemic is over, I think any involuntary reductions will be minimal,” Shandro said during a press conference in October 2020.

In a Friday statement, Health Minister Jason Copping’s press secretary Steve Buick said the UCP promised Albertans that it would reduce surgical wait times and the Alberta Surgical Initiative was developed to deliver on that promise.

“Contracting Chartered Surgical Facilities (CSFs) to provide publicly funded services is not new in Alberta. Under the NDP, 42 independent surgery clinics (CSFs) provided 40,000 surgeries a year under contract to AHS, about 15 per cent of total publicly funded surgeries each year,” said Buick.

“Budget 2022 will include increases in operating and capital funding to do more surgeries, including increasing capacity in hospitals and CSFs.”