EDMONTON — Friends of Medicare and activists within the disability community are returning to the Alberta Legislature today to renew our calls on the UCP government to improve our home care system. In March 2024 this petition was first tabled in the Legislature. More than a year later, our calls for improved home care funding and services in Alberta have remained ignored by this government. As of today, our petition has reached over 37,000 signatures in support, and will be tabled again in the Legislature today following Question Period.
In the past year, Albertans have received little information from the provincial government as to the future of our home care system. Instead, we have seen the unveiling of an entirely new agency, Assisted Living Alberta, as part of the government’s drastic restructuring of our health care system, which has done nothing but amplify confusion and uncertainty for health care workers and Albertans in need of continuing care.
Meanwhile, funding for home care has far from kept up with what is needed to meet population growth or inflation, let alone any meaningful investment to support a growing demand for services. This, despite the UCP government’s stated plans to shift the delivery of Alberta’s continuing care services to include a greater proportion of care in-community by up to 9%, as per Facility-Based Continuing Care (FBCC) review recommendations.
For the 127,000 people in Alberta who depend on temporary or permanent home care each year, chronic underfunding and systemic privatization has increasingly equaled unmet care needs, out-of-pocket costs, and a reliance on unpaid family caregivers for Albertans and their loved ones.
“This is not simply a matter of ideological differences; it’s life or death for Albertans like myself with round-the-clock care needs. It’s objectively illogical and uneconomical to deny us the right to stay in our homes to live as the multidimensional individuals we are. Locking us away in ill-equipped institutions is a terribly expensive death sentence — and a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars. Without urgent and meaningful changes to home care, Disabled folks and our families will be forced into increasingly impossible situations, such as choosing between urination or work; bowel movements or sleep; meals or showers. It’s not only personal and familial autonomy at stake, but our continued survival, too." — Karli Drew, Greater Edmonton Area disability activist, writer, creator, & consultant
“Family caregivers make up nearly $12 billion dollars in unpaid labour in Alberta alone – that’s $12 billion this government is underspending on staffing every year. Disabled people in this province are faced with the reality that if we run out of friends or family to exploit, we will have to be institutionalized. We deserve to live in our communities without being punished for needing care.” — Daniel Ennett, Edmonton disability activist & filmmaker
“I live every day with the acute awareness that the only reason I am to get an education, be active in my community, and shape my own future is because my family is, for now, able and willing to help me pay thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs to cover my basic care needs. I am also aware that most disabled people in this province aren't as privileged or lucky as I have been. When luck is the sole determinant of our access to a safe and dignified life, our home care system is failing us. It is terrifying that limited resources are used as an excuse to dehumanize disabled Albertans.” — Erin Novakowski, Calgary disability activist & student
“Promises to expand community care are effectively meaningless without a plan to fund and staff it. But rather than investing in home care, the government’s priority appears to be restructuring our health care system and contracting out care services to private, for-profit providers, which is only worsening care standards and working conditions in home care, and leaving the care needs of seniors and people with disabilities unmet.” — Chris Gallaway, executive director of Friends of Medicare
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