EDMONTON — Before announcing her plan for education infrastructure, Premier Smith’s 10-minute televised address opened last night with an extended anti-immigration rant, blaming folks moving here from other countries for Alberta’s lack of capacity in health, housing and education.
Racial discrimination remains a pernicious systemic problem in Alberta’s health care and our other public services, and a critical social determinant of health.
“For Danielle Smith to further stoke this with a blatantly racist televised rant against immigrants and immigration is shocking and beyond disgusting,” said Chris Gallaway, executive director of Friends of Medicare. “Fueling xenophobia and racism to deflect from her own government’s record on public services is completely unacceptable from an elected official. The Premier should apologize and take responsibility for her own government’s decisions and lack of infrastructure planning.”
In February of 2023, a leaked provincial report titled "Inpatient Bed Deficit Projections" showed that the government was aware that the Edmonton zone was on track to be 1,500 hospital beds short by 2026. Bed shortages have long been an issue across the province, even before the most recent population boom.
“As our population has continued to grow, we have fallen further and further behind in hospital bed capacity in Alberta,” said Gallaway. “The last hospital built in Edmonton was in 1988. Since then, our population has almost doubled. The government has known for years that we are thousands of beds short across the province. But rather than offer a plan or timelines to get facilities built, open, and staffed, they have instead cancelled crucial facilities, including the South Edmonton Hospital in the most recent provincial budget.”
Instead of developing a plan for our health care infrastructure and workforce, the government has threatened layoffs and a hiring freeze, created chaos through restructuring, while funding the expanded use of private, for-profit health services in Alberta. All of which have hurt our capacity, and made it harder for people in this province to access the health care they need.
“You can’t say ‘Alberta is calling’ for years, and brag about record population growth, then act surprised when that same population growth increases the demand on our public services,” said Gallaway. “Stoking chaos and then offering up privatization as a solution to our challenges is an age-old strategy. We saw the Premier use it again last night, making it clear that turning public dollars over to private entities to run our public services has been the real goal all along.”
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