EDMONTON — Last week, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) released a new report in which Andrew Longhurst looks into the Alberta government’s attempts to defend Bill 11: the Health Statutes Amendment Act 2025 (no. 2) by pointing at other jurisdictions.
The report concludes that:
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… dual physician practice based on the Alberta approach—allowing physicians to simultaneously work in the public system and private-pay market—does not exist in western European health systems. Rather, these countries exhibit a greater commitment to public financing and regulation than Canadian provinces. […] This is a decisive shift towards U.S. health care based on greed and profit-taking, not “European” health care based largely on principles of social solidarity and universality.
“Danielle Smith and her government have attempted to claim that what they are doing with Bill 11 is no different than what already exists in Quebec and New Brunswick—an untrue claim that the New Brunswick health minister was quick to clarify is not the case—or in European models that allow ‘dual physician practice’,” said Chris Gallaway, executive director of Friends of Medicare. “But the truth is, implementing Bill 11 will bring two tier Americanized health care to Alberta. The government knows this. But they also know that Albertans don’t support that, so they’re doing everything they can to try to deflect, including pointing elsewhere to try and distract us from what they are really doing.”
Since passing Bill 11, the government and its spokespeople have regularly returned to the claim that what they are implementing is ‘European’ style health care, a sweeping statement about a continent with dozens of countries and unique health care systems. As the CCPA report makes clear, these kinds of policy claims are cherry-picked, and immediately fall apart under the scrutiny of further context and analysis.
“If our government were genuinely interested in looking to Europe for health care policy solutions, we should be having discussions about how European countries approach primary and preventative care, the number of beds and doctors they have per capita, their widespread inclusion of universal drug coverage, their tax rates and labour laws, or be looking closer at Denmark’s approach to seniors care,” said Gallaway. “But it’s clear from their cherry-picking and finger-pointing that the Alberta government isn’t interested in a genuine policy debate. They're attempting to distract from their real goal: dismantling single-payer public Medicare and throwing the doors wide open to the for-profit market for health care in Alberta.”
Friends of Medicare is calling on Albertans to speak out against Bill 11 by signing our petition opposing Two Tier health care in Alberta, and by writing to their MLA.
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