Over half a million Albertans don’t have a family doctor, stressed families are waiting for hours in the emergency room with sick children, and frail seniors are living in pain for months, or even years, awaiting much-needed surgery. We expect our government to be urgently working to address these pressing healthcare issues.
But what have Premier Smith and her government been doing for the health of Albertans? Since coming into power, they have hired and fired four different CEOs of Alberta Health Services, paying an estimated $2 million dollars in severance pay for them not to work. The government has dismissed two Alberta Health Services boards of directors, including one appointed under Smith’s leadership. Her government has spent another $2 million on an embarrassing review of data from the COVID-19 pandemic response – a report that has been condemned by the Canadian Medical Association, the Alberta Medical Association and dozens of doctors whose leadership was instrumental in saving thousands of lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.
And most recently, Alberta’s auditor general, Doug Wylie, has announced that he will be reviewing procurement and contracting practices within Alberta Health Services and the health ministry. He is responding to allegations of government interference and potential conflict of interest in multimillion dollar deals to buy medications and personal protective equipment, and in awarding expensive private surgical contracts. These allegations have not been proven in court.
While this flurry of newsworthy activity is going on, in the background more expensive structural changes are underway to dismantle Alberta’s healthcare system. Our unified healthcare system was the object of envy for other Canadian provinces such as Nova Scotia and Manitoba who are using our previous healthcare system as an example to reform their own. At the same time, our government is taking a high-functioning single health authority and replacing it with a bureaucratic and fragmented system that fixes none of the problems that everyday Albertans face.
The two-year $85 million exercise in restructuring Alberta’s healthcare system is a severe underestimation of how much taxpayer money will be wasted, as well as a diversion of time and energy from providing Albertans with the care they need right now. Imagine how many hip surgeries could be done for the same price tag, how many family doctors trained, and how many nurses hired to keep rural emergency departments open for Albertans in their time of need?
At best, the government is out of touch with the health care needs of Albertans, and why they were voted into power. At worst, they are interested in concentrating power in their own hands, and rewarding supporters and friends. Taken separately, any one of these blunders can be seen as an ill-advised misstep, but when taken as a whole there emerges a pattern of authoritarianism and disregard for public interests. It should make us question why we elected this government into power? What do we need to do as citizens to redirect the attention of our government to matters that will make a positive difference in our lives?
For one, we should be shouting from the rooftops that the voting public will not tolerate wasteful political and bureaucratic exercises paid from public coffers. While we tend to associate the word “corruption” with rogue states on faraway continents, it is naïve to think that mismanagement of essential public services and waste of taxpayer money does not happen in our own province.
We need to contact our Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) and call for an independent public inquiry into how multimillion dollar medical contracts were awarded by Alberta Health Services and the health ministry. We have to demand that public dollars never be used for pseudoscientific reports producing harmful health misinformation about ineffective or dangerous treatment of serious conditions. Most importantly we need to be asking our government to increase recruitment and retention of healthcare workers, train more nurses and primary care providers, and boost the capacity of publicly-funded hospitals to provide high-quality and timely surgeries.
Our politicians have been elected to improve healthcare access, quality and timeliness for Albertans and we need to remind them of their duty. We need to be courageous in asking for transparency in how public dollars are spent and we need to hold our elected officials accountable. It is time to send the message to our government that we see what they are doing and it is not what we elected them to do.
Vamini Selvanandan is a rural family physician and public health practitioner in Alberta. For more articles like this, visit www.engagedcitizen.ca.
© 2025. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.
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