All posts tagged Fred Horne

Alberta Health Services to be run from Vancouver Island? Top 99 execs to get bonuses after all?

by David Climenhaga on June 15, 2013 in Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics with 3 Comments

Alberta Health Services CEO Chris Eagle, Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne and AHS Administrative Officer Janet Davidson at yesterday’s press conference in Edmonton.

Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne began the day yesterday explaining why he may not be able to prevent Alberta Health Services’ 99 top managers from getting their controversial bonuses – you know, the ones he fired the 10 members of the AHS board over on Wednesday.

Of course, this just encourages tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists who have decided it’s highly unlikely Mr. Horne canned the board of the giant public health care agency over something that popped onto his radar screen this week, as was suggested to the public, or that he just happened to have a $580,000-a-year “Official Administrator” waiting in the wings to take over on one day’s notice.

But who would have thought the new administrator in question would be planning to do at least some of her job from her new home on Vancouver Island?

Denying the notorious 99 their $3.2 million in bonuses was turning out to be “a bit of a legal mess at the moment,” Mr. Horne elucidated in the morning news reports, saying it was because the board had defied his orders and approved the payments while it still had the legal power to do so.

He picked up on this theme again at a press conference, which was called yesterday afternoon at an Edmonton Hospital to introduce Janet Davidson, the one-woman board equivalent with whom he has replaced the rebellious directors, stating: “It’s a very complicated issue.”

Actually, if you’ll pardon a blogger for saying so, it’s not really all that complicated. Whether they ought to have done so or not, the board, which was appointed by Mr. Horne, agreed to pay the execs, and now AHS has the legal obligation to do so.

It’s sort of like when I use my credit card to buy something. I’m agreeing to pay for it and sooner or later I’m going to have to fork over the dough.

So, really, it’s pretty simple. They’re going to have to pay the 99 execs, just like they’re eventually going to have to pay severance to Alauddin Merali, the former AHS chief financial officer who was fired last year over the expense account claims he filed back when he played the same role at Capital Health, all of which were approved by his bosses there.

Back at the news conference, meanwhile, it was apparent something’s going on, because Alberta’s usually tame media were feistier than normal today, if not exactly ferocious.

They brought up the business about Ms. Davidson’s recent purchase of a house on Vancouver Island – community unnamed – although nobody asked if she’s going to make like a Senator from the island on the other side of the country and hold another province’s health-care card and driver’s license while she runs Alberta’s health system for us poor schmucks who have to live here through the winter.

According to Ms. Davidson, as far as her previous employer, KPMG, was concerned, she could live wherever she wanted as long as it had an Internet connection and a good airport. Presumably the same deal now applies to the top jobs in AHS.

It’s not 100 per cent clear what Ms. Davidson will be doing, other than “advising” Dr. Chris Eagle, AHS’s remarkably mild-mannered CEO, on how to do his job. Dr. Eagle was also at the news conference showing occasional signs of animation.

Despite their uncharacteristic vigour at the newser, journalists mostly dutifully picked up the claim in Mr. Horne’s press release that Ms. Davidson’s annual salary is roughly $100,000 less than the board was paid in honoraria in the last fiscal year.

Most, however, did not mention NDP Leader Brian Mason’s observation that since both Ms. Davidson and Dr. Eagle, who is also paid $580,000 … plus bonuses … now seem to be doing the same job, that’s not really much of a saving.

Reporters at the newser also pressed Mr. Horne and Ms. Davidson pretty hard about just when the new Official Administrator was first asked to consider the job. “It was late Tuesday,” she said of her formal offer, although readers will just have to forgive many Albertans who are paying attention for suspecting there’s a bit more to this story than that.

As Wildrose Seniors Critic Kerry Towle wondered: “She’s clearly a high calibre person, sought after by so many people, and yet she is available to come to Alberta on a whim? I highly doubt that!”

The journalists were also cranky about how a five-month-old report critical of the board just happened to surface on the government’s website last week. “We didn’t keep it from the public,” Mr. Horne insisted. “The intent was always to make it public. … The intent was never to withhold it.” You know…

Mr. Horne was very determined – sort of – to squelch suggestions, including some in this blog, that he and Ms. Davidson are now going to re-reorganize Alberta Health Services back into multiple heath regions.

“This is not an excuse for rethinking health care from Ground Zero,” Mr. Horne stated unequivocally early in the news conference. Later, though, on the same topic, he said: “We’ll look at all the options.”

In other words, stay tuned….

Premier Alison Redford, meanwhile, was also in British Columbia yesterday, thawing out her once-frosty relationship with B.C. Premier Christy Clark.

Ms. Clark took a break from door knocking in Kelowna, where she is trying to win back a seat in the B.C. Legislature, to take a friendly stroll with her Alberta counterpart.

“Kelowna is essentially an Alberta outpost,” Redford spokesthingy Stefan Baranski Tweeted from the Okanagan city the night before. “Every person I’ve met tonight lives in our great province. My Alberta includes Kelowna.”

Nice to know the pipeline, as it were, runs both ways.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The way the cookie crumbled: Fred Horne fires Stephen Lockwood, entire AHS board

by David Climenhaga on June 13, 2013 in Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics with 6 Comments

The former Alberta Health Services Board, fired yesterday by Health Minister Fred Horne, as seen by the 99 top executives of the provincial health care agency. Actual AHS board members may not appear exactly as portrayed by the health minister. Below: Former AHS CEO Stephen Duckett, former AHS board chair Stephen Lockwood, Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne.

As Stephen Duckett, once the CEO of Alberta Health Services, might have said to Stephen Lockwood, who until yesterday morning was the chair of the AHS Board: “Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.”

Dr. Duckett and Mr. Lockwood both met sudden ends as senior officials of the Alberta health care system when Alberta’s often-arbitrary Progressive Conservative government began to view them as more of an impediment than an aide to its plans.

As alert readers will recall, the putative cause for Dr. Duckett’s dismissal in November 2010 was the fact he was rude to a reporter while eating an oatmeal-raisin cookie. The real reason, of course, was that the Australian PhD economist had become a lightning rod for public dissatisfaction with the massive provincial health board the government of then-premier Ed Stelmach had created two years before.

In fairness to the PCs, Premier Alison Redford’s health minister, Fred Horne, had a marginally better case for firing Mr. Lockwood, who was openly defiant in his refusal to do the government’s bidding and halt the embarrassing payments of bonuses to 99 top AHS executives.

Mr. Lockwood was obviously operating under the illusion the government meant what it said when it told him the board of AHS was independent. Well, now he knows how things really work in Alberta!

Mr. Horne certainly seemed to act decisively, canning not only the rebellious board chair, a hard-ass trucking executive from Calgary who wasn’t used to back chat from mere ministers of the Crown, but the entire 10-member AHS board.

He did it within five minutes of the start of his 9:30 press conference called for the purpose, and less than 12 hours after Mr. Lockwood’s defiance became clear to everyone in the province.

Mr. Horne immediately appointed Janet Davidson, a former deputy minister unknown to the public, as Official Administrator of the board’s affairs – and there’s a strong whiff in the air of the possibility the government will never again appoint a board to run the affairs of AHS.

However, it seems likely the act was more thoroughly and carefully premeditated than yesterday’s political choreography suggests.

Just for starters, Ms. Davidson didn’t just happen to stroll through Mr. Horne’s office door Monday afternoon and say, well, sure, she’d be prepared to take over by the end of the week.

Plus, there were those five mysterious – and mysteriously unspecified – acts of defiance by Mr. Lockwood that were noted in the minister’s press release. More than one of us, I suspect, would love to know just what commands Mr. Lockwood chose to disobey.

So, no, this wasn’t quite as spontaneous a development as we have been led to believe.

Regardless, as was argued in this blog yesterday, there is no way Mr. Horne is going to escape this imbroglio without a certain amount of egg on his face.

He looks like a flip-flopper of dubious judgment, having appointed Mr. Lockwood with high praise less than 10 months before and made public statements in March suggesting that while he didn’t like the board’s plan to pay $3.2 million in bonuses to the execs, he would go along with it.

But he won’t look weak to the public – which, in the world of conservative politics is an even graver sin than flip-floppery. And who knows, this may very well play in Ponoka, the Albertan equivalent of Peoria.

Anyway, given Mr. Lockwood’s persistent defiance, once Mr. Horne had publicly given him his marching orders, the government really had no choice but to make him walk the plank when he declined to obey them.

Presumably Mr. Lockwood understood this and reckoned that outcome worked for him – his determination to stand up to the government certainly won’t harm his reputation in Alberta’s business and legal communities.

Mr. Horne and the government will now just have to live with the embarrassment of having fired a guy who is claimed to have just saved AHS $100 million and who less than a year ago they were touting as the best thing ever to happen to health care in Alberta since they hired … erm, Stephen Duckett.

Moreover, the minister will also have to get used to the fact there’s now nothing at all standing between his government and what happens in the health care system, which is bound to be controversial and unpopular with many voters no matter what he does next.

Case in point, in an attempt to reassure the public all is well despite the drama, Mr. Horne stated that “nothing about today’s decision changes the normal delivery of health care in Alberta.”

Indeed, he went on, “hospitals and other care facilities continue with normal operations. The changes we announce today are unlikely to be noticed by most people.”

AHS management, meanwhile, presumably backed by the former board, which included nary a representative of the public interest, has been pushing “workforce transformation” that to date has involved the elimination of well over 200 Registered Nurse and Licensed Practical Nurse positions and their replacement by unskilled health care aides.

This is not likely to reassure Albertans worried about the quality of health care they might receive if they require it, unless Mr. Horne means to say that the cuts to skilled nursing staff are about to stop.

The last time the situation in heath care seemed this chaotic and confusing here in Alberta, premier Stelmach shuffled Ron Liepert, the bull-in-a-china-shop health minister of the day, to another portfolio and replaced him with Gene Zwozdesky, the velvet-voiced old crooner of the PC caucus.

Mr. Horne played a key role in this calming effort, promoted by the premier to Parliamentary Assistant for Health, which turned out to be a stepping stone to his current position.

Alas, Mr. Horne is now on the hot seat and Mr. Zwozdesky is no longer available, having been rewarded for his good service last time by being made the Speaker of the House.

No one in the Redford Government caucus springs to mind with natural diplomatic skills to match Mr. Zwozdesky’s.

So for the time being AHS will likely shuffle along from disaster to catastrophe, erratically led, its problems exacerbated by the dysfunctional corporate model imposed on public health care back when Ralph Klein was premier of Alberta.

It’s hard to imagine how this can end well for Ms. Redford, Mr. Horne and the PC Party. Or, for that matter, for most of the rest of us!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

AHS Chair Stephen Lockwood to Health Minister Horne on executive bonuses: ‘Drop dead, Fred!’

by David Climenhaga on June 12, 2013 in Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics with 7 Comments

Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne: it’s hard to imagine how he can come out of this fight with Alberta Health Services Chair Stephen Lockwood not looking foolish or weak. Below: Mr. Lockwood in a screen grab from his first news conference as AHS chair.

Whatever happens next, it seems certain Alberta Health Minster Fred Horne is going to end up with egg on his face.

Indeed, when the dust has settled from the current contretemps at Alberta Health Services, the entire government of Alison Redford is likely to look foolish.

Challenged yesterday by Alberta Health Services Chair Stephen Lockwood over the question of bonuses for the health system’s top 99 executives, Mr. Horne has no way to respond that won’t make him look either foolish or weak, possibly both.

Yesterday morning, Mr. Horne ordered Mr. Lockwood in no uncertain terms not to pay $3.2 million in budgeted bonuses in the current fiscal year to the senior executives of AHS, the massive province-wide health agency that was created in 2008 by former Premier Ed Stelmach and then-health-minister Ron Liepert.

“Later this afternoon, the AHS board will announce that it has made a decision to award bonuses to its employees,” Mr. Horne prophesied in a statement issued after a news conference in Lethbridge.

“However, at a time when we’ve asked our front-line providers – including doctors and teachers – to take freezes in pay, we cannot and will not accept AHS’s decision,” he said. “It is completely out of step with the times. As a result, today, I have issued a directive that instructs the AHS board to reconsider its decision to pay executive bonuses.” (Emphasis added by me.)

Never mind that back in March, Mr. Horne said in response to questions about exactly the same situation: “It’s a decision for the AHS board.” But that was then and this is now – a time frame during which it appears to have dawned on the government that generous bonuses for senior public-sector executives are both sure to be unpopular with voters and bad optics for a government demanding big concessions from public service unions.

The independent-minded AHS chair, however, obviously had other ideas.

Yesterday afternoon, Mr. Lockwood, a lawyer and trucking company executive from Calgary who is plainly used to not being challenged by anyone about anything, called a special meeting of the board, where the members promptly voted to defy Mr. Horne and pay the bonuses.

One has to feel a certain sympathy for Mr. Lockwood’s position, which is that a deal’s a deal, the executives were promised bonuses this year and AHS will keep its word. Next year, there will be no bonuses, Mr. Lockwood has already said.

“This is about doing something once you have said it and not backtracking on it,” he told a local newspaper yesterday.

His challenge to the health minister leaves Mr. Horne and the Redford Government with only two choices, neither of them particularly palatable:

Mr. Horne can fire the entire board, or at least Mr. Lockwood.

This will make the health minister look like a fool.

After all, it was Mr. Horne who appointed Mr. Lockwood as chair less than a year ago in September 2012, praising his “tremendous business experience” and touting him as the right man to lead the health system into the future. (Mr. Lockwood was the permanent replacement for Ken Hughes, who quit to run for Ms. Redford’s Progressive Conservative Party, for which he is now the energy minister.)

And imagine what would happen if it were then revealed that AHS was doing much better than expected financially under Mr. Lockwood’s leadership – even after the bonuses!

On the other hand, Mr. Horne could not fire Mr. Lockwood.

This will make the minister appear powerless, or at least weak.

Firing any member of the board over voting to do its duty as it sees fit will also raise serious and potentially complicated questions about who actually runs AHS.

The board exists, after all, to insulate the government from unpopular decisions about the administration of the provincial health system. If any member of the board is fired because for not doing the government’s bidding over an item of business well within the purview of the board, the whole edifice is exposed as a fraud and the health system as little more than a government department.

If anything goes wrong – and, count on it, there are going to be big health care controversies facing this government in the next few months – Mr. Horne and the rest of the Redford Government will have nothing to hide behind and no one to blame.

It would also raise the question of just what we taxpayers are paying Dr. Chris Eagle, the CEO of AHS, his $585,000-per-year salary (plus his controversial bonus, cutely termed “pay at risk” by AHS) to do if Mr. Horne is now running the show himself.

But if Mr. Horne doesn’t fire the board, he will be tolerating an open rebellion – surely not an example this increasingly shaky-seeming government wants to offer when there may be other rebellions brewing, even within Ms. Redford’s own Tory caucus.

Probably the best option for Mr. Horne is to keep Mr. Lockwood and the rest of the board on, but somehow persuade them to change their minds. It doesn’t sound, though, very much as if Mr. Lockwood will give him that chance.

Perhaps Mr. Horne should have paid attention to what Mr. Lockwood had to say for himself when he hired him.

“I’ve never been one to back down from a challenge,” Mr. Lockwood said at his first news conference as chair. Apparently he meant it.

Well, this is what happens when the government appoints people who turn out to have minds of their own – something that doesn’t happen very often here in PC Alberta.

Stand by for developments.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Redford Government just can’t seem to stop fumbling health care expenses frenzy

by David Climenhaga on April 19, 2013 in Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics, Alison Redford with 2 Comments

Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne, right, helps Premier Alison Redford get ready to face Opposition questions about Alberta Health Services expense accounts. Alberta politicians may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Health executives Michele Lahey, Sheila Weatherill, Alison Tonge. 

The clueless ineptitude of the Redford Government dealing with Alberta’s continuing health system expense account brouhaha is matched only by the belligerence of the Opposition in portraying the situation as an outrage and a scandal.

Since mainstream media now routinely refer to the matter that way – “Redford, opposition trade barbs over Alberta Health Services expense scandal,” is how the Edmonton Journal headlined the story yesterday – it’s fair to say the opposition strategy is working.

Whether it’s in answers to questions in the Legislature, management of issues by Premier Alison Redford’s newly hired phalanx of former Ontario spin doctors, the juvenile quality of a stream of mean-spirited Tweets from the deputy premier’s BlackBerry, or just the Progressive Conservatives’ apparent inability to predict when the next embarrassing story is about to break, her government seems to be operating without a clue in a cartload!

Rudimentary issues-management skills should have allowed Ms. Redford to step out of the way with aplomb when the two latest loads of stuff hit the proverbial fan. Instead, she got splattered!

The first one was this week’s revelation that in 2008 a senior Capital Health Region executive had a trip to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for cancer tests, which by the sound of it weren’t needed, approved by her boss as a legitimate expense to be paid by the public.

“I was instructed to go for a further consultation at the Mayo Clinic by my boss to ensure that I was clear of the condition. As it was not my decision, it was funded by my employer,” former CHR vice-president Michele Lahey told a local newspaper after she was tracked down at the private hospital where she now works in the United Kingdom.

“I do not believe I have done anything wrong,” she added. So no, she wouldn’t be repaying the money – and, as Health Minister Fred Horne admitted, the government concluded it didn’t have a leg to stand on when it pondered trying to collect the $7,800 from her.

Ms. Redford wasn’t even thought of as a potential premier at the time this happened, let alone the occupant of the office. Mr. Horne wasn’t the minister either. And, for heaven’s sake, Alberta Health Services hadn’t even been created – and when it was it was supposedly in part to fix just such problems.

Yet Ms. Redford and her advisors let that ball just sail by. Even the fact it originated with a Freedom of Information filing apparently failed to alert the government the story was about to break.

Still, since it also looked as much like a case of line jumping as one of expense account shenanigans, the government could plausibly have pleaded it was looking into that through the Health Care Preferential Treatment Inquiry led by retired judge John Vertes.

Alas for them, they’d already closed that affair down – apparently over the wishes of Judge Vertes – managing to make the whole thing look like a cover-up on top of everything else.

You have to admit, it takes real talent to bungle things this badly! And we’re still less than halfway through the story!

The second punch in the one-two combination came in the form of the next revelation, that another former senior health executive – this one hired for Alberta Health Services by former CEO Stephen Duckett, the fellow fired in November 2011 for misusing an oatmeal-raisin cookie – had been allowed to expense $1,200 in medical tests needed to get permission to move to Canada.

Surely the government could have blown that one off with the excuse it’s standard practice to do such things when recruiting top executives from abroad?

But, no, perhaps from bad luck, perhaps by bad management, they seem to have managed to drop that ball too. Maybe they forgot because, barely three years after she was hired as strategy and performance VP, Alison Tonge had also packed up and moved back to the U.K.

Now it’s been revealed by the Calgary Herald AHS paid Ms. Tonge at least $426,576 to go away!

This too happened before Ms. Redford’s watch began, but no matter. You’d think the government would have figured out by now the FOI requests just aren’t going to stop until journalists have pumped that well dry, so they might as well release everything and make a virtue of necessity. Don’t count on it, though, because strategic thinking doesn’t seem to be part of the Redford Government’s repertoire.

Yesterday afternoon, former Capital Health CEO Sheila Weatherill threw up her hands at this and said she shouldn’t have authorized Ms. Lahey’s trip to Minnesota, so she’d personally pay back the $7,800 – the cost plus inflation. Maybe she’s just nostalgic for the days the local media used to treat her with adulation.

A gleeful Mr. Horne – who may or may not have come up with the idea himself – told the media he had Ms. Weatherill’s cheque in hand.

Not that this is likely to end the feeding frenzy any time soon. Somebody’s bound to do so anyway, so it might as well be me that points out this still leaves Ms. Weatherill with $1,492,200 of her controversial 2008 buyout – and that’s not counting her $1.7-million executive retirement plan and her pension!

Since all three opposition parties have got their teeth into a good thing with this stuff, we can’t reasonably expect any of them to stop as long as the headlines keep coming.

And as we get closer to the next election in 2015, it’s safe to predict the Opposition will up the ante.

In particular, the Official Opposition, the far-right Wildrose Party under former Fraser Institute intern Danielle Smith, which has no more use for public health care than most of Ms. Redford’s caucus and cabinet, is joined at the hip with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party. As is well known, Mr. Harper’s Robocall Party has negative campaigning implanted deep in its political DNA.

If in the run-up to the next election in 2016 the Wildrosers don’t stoop to the kind of advertising we just saw welcome Justin Trudeau to his new role as federal Liberal leader, it will be an astonishing development.

So if Ms. Redford and her insiders can’t up their game, we are led inevitably to two conclusions:

First, the next three years will see politics in Alberta descend to a whole new low of American-style viciousness – the fear of which made former Premier Ed Stelmach throw up his hands and quit in 2011.

Second, if the premier can’t get her act together, the possibility of a Wildrose government – which seemed laughably unlikely a year ago as Ms. Redford’s PCs celebrated their comfortable election victory – every day seems more like a probability.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Count on it: Alberta’s doctors got more than the government’s press release indicates

by David Climenhaga on April 16, 2013 in Alberta Medical Association, Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics, Labour Relations, Post-Secondary Education with 6 Comments

Dr. Michael Giuffre jots down the Alberta Medical Association’s wish list before yesterday’s agreement with the provincial government. Actual AMA negotiators may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne, Advanced Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk.

It will take a while to sort out what really happened in yesterday’s deal between the Redford Government and Alberta’s doctors, but you can count on it there’s more there than meets the eye.

Premier Alison Redford, Health Minister Fred Horne and Alberta Medical Association President Dr. Michael Giuffre were all smiles at a news conference in Calgary yesterday afternoon where they announced the seven-year agreement that will run from April 1, 2011, to March 31, 2018. The deal will give the physicians three years with no pay increase, followed by two years with 2.5-per-cent increases, then two years of cost of living adjustments.

This will allow the government or its proxies to go into negotiations with its public sector unions and say the teachers did it, now the docs have done it, so you’ll just have to take your zeroes too. Smile while you swallow your medicine.

It will also give the government a spell of “labour peace” that will last until well after the next provincial election with a group that’s made plenty of trouble in the past.

So what’s in it for the docs? The saw-off as it’s being described by the media is that the deal will let the doctors keep several generous programs that pad their bottom lines, give them a role in future consultations on how they are paid, provide the AMA with the comfort of what a real collective agreement would call a “union rights” clause, plus hand them a $68-million one-time lump sum that will “address various financial challenges faced by physician practices,” whatever that means.

But you can count on it that there’s more to this deal than meets the eye – and that the docs got far more than the media coverage or the government’s press release suggest.

The two-year-plus fight this agreement ends, it is said here, has always been about who controls the province’s health care system, the doctors or the government.

After this, without being able to read the fine print, it’s probably safe to put your money on the doctors.

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Programs and jobs go over the side as post-secondary education cuts start to bite

When progressive Alberta voters suddenly switched their votes in April 2013 from their traditional parties to Ms. Redford’s supposedly Progressive Conservatives, it’s unlikely they expected to trigger a wholesale attack on public post-secondary education. It certainly wasn’t what they wished for.

But thanks to Ms. Redford’s conveniently timed and already dissipating “Bitumen Bubble,” that is what they got.

In the latest episode, the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees revealed Friday that the budget attack on post-secondary education will result in elimination of paramedic, practical nursing and other programs at Lakeland College sites in Camrose, Lloydminster, Vermilion, and Edmonton. Lakeland’s American Sign Language training program will also go over the side.

The cuts at Lakeland will result in the loss of 60 jobs in those communities, including 20 teaching positions.

But the situation at Lakeland barely scratches the surface of what’s happening in post-secondary education as the Redford Conservatives – to whom progressive voters naively turned out of legitimate fear of what the seemingly more market fundamentalist Wildrose Party might do – move sharply back to the right.

The day before AUPE’s revelation, Advanced Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk met with the presidents of 26 post-secondary institutions, but refused to retreat from his plans for destructive budget cuts.

The government has hinted it will temporarily freeze tuition increases, which would keep students out of the streets and the whole fiasco out of the media.

Meanwhile, however, the post-secondaries are left to figure out how to trim millions from their budgets – $42-million at the University of Alberta alone, with entire programs like the U of A’s Master of Library and Information Services degree rumoured to be facing the chop.

In this atmosphere of gloom, faculty at Athabasca University exchanged bargaining proposals with their employer on last week. The university is seeking two years of salary and grid freezes, plus 10 days without pay.

Free spending university administrators, who have rewarded themselves generously in the past, are threatening layoffs if they don’t get their way – potentially a problem since one in seven Athabasca employees have already been laid off or bought out.

For its part, the faculty proposed a one-year agreement (July 1, 2013, to June 30, 2014) with a cost-of-living adjustment 2 per cent effective July 1. In 2010, teachers also took zero and five pay-free days.

Mr. Lukaszuk has said he thinks the answer is “creative solutions” to open up more post-secondary seats in Alberta. This has led to speculation he doesn’t understand the difference between “creative” and “imaginary.”

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Classless federal Tory attack ad likely to backfire

Liver disease may not be as sexy as heart disease or cancer when it comes to fund-raising, but the Canadian Liver Foundation gave Justin Trudeau a boost just the same on his first day on the job as Liberal leader by making it obvious just how cheesy that long-anticipated first Conservative attack ad was.

The classless ad released within minutes of Mr. Trudeau’s victory announcement yesterday showed the new Liberal leader slipping off his shirt and tried to imply that means he’s some kind of flaky kid.

The Liver Foundation pointed out in a Tweet that Mr. Trudeau was raising money for them in the clip: “We feel @JustinTrudeau should be applauded for his support of a serious health issue that affects 3.4 million Cdns,” the message said.

Now, this wasn’t quite as bad as the Kim Campbell Conservatives mocking Jean Chretien’s appearance back in 1993, but it’s likely to be about as effective.

It’s said here the Conservative smear machine’s broadsides against previous Liberal leaders Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff worked in large part because most Canadians knew very little about them when the sleaze machine set about to define them for us.

But Canadians, even those who don’t support him, have a much better picture of whom Mr. Trudeau is, what he stands for and what he’s usually doing when his shirt comes off. (Viz., raising money for charity, even if it means he has to beat the snot out of a Tory Senator.)

Moreover, we all expected the Tories to attack Mr. Trudeau on the grounds of inexperience – an odd strategy by a party led by a man like Prime Minister Stephen Harper who has never held a real job outside politics.

In this context, the ads are likely to flop as badly as Mr. Harper’s bizarre and muddled suggestion Mr. Trudeau is calling for lower taxes in China. Possibly, they even have the potential to flop as badly as Ms. Campbell’s election campaign, way back when.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Despite neocon flameout distraction, Redford Tory bumbling dominates Alberta news

by David Climenhaga on March 3, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics, Labour Relations with 2 Comments

Neocon Icarus Tom Flanagan (appropriately covered, thank goodness) at right, falls to earth after flying too close to the sun. Preston Manning hovers nearby. The flameout of actual neoconservative avatars may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Health Minister Fred Horne, Education Minister Jeff Johnson, and retired judge John Z. Vertes, who are the people this post is really about.

Even word that Tom Flanagan, the Icarus of Canada’s neoconservative movement, had flown too close to the sun and was coming down to earth in flames was not enough to save Alberta’s crisis-prone Progressive Conservative government from more pain!

One would have thought Premier Alison Redford would have been cheered when the principal architect of the Opposition Wildrose Party’s brush with victory last April appeared at a seminar to defend users of child pornography and thereby assured his own political and professional demise.

After all, he was very nearly the cause of her party’s destruction.

But instead, most local mainstream media continued to focus on the only-slightly-less-startling condemnation of Ms. Redford’s Progressive Conservative Government by retired Justice John Z. Vertes, head of the province’s tightly controlled and far-from-independent inquiry into health system queue jumping.

Local media also enthusiastically covered the education minister’s (mis)use of teacher email addresses, especially the fact it is now being investigated by the Alberta Information and Privacy Commissioner, to try to bypass the collective bargaining process by negotiating directly with union members.

So despite whatever satisfaction they may have felt at Dr. Flanagan’s long fall to earth, the neocon guru’s very bad day Thursday didn’t really offer the Redford Tories much respite from their self-inflicted troubles.

It was a different story in Ottawa, where Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s so-called Conservatives went from rubbing their hands with glee at the morning prospect of tormenting the New Democrats over the defection of a Quebec MP to the Bloc Quebecois to playing embarrassing defence for Dr. Flanagan’s outrageous commentary by mid-afternoon.

Getting back to Mr. Vertes’ surprising accusation, the retired judge’s charge that Health Minister Fred Horne was interfering with the Health Care Preferential Access Inquiry’s independence, such as it is, was the most damaging blow to the government on the day Dr. Flanagan was flaming out.

On Thursday, Mr. Vertes said publicly at a session of the inquiry that Mr. Horne had refused to grant him the extra time he needed to properly probe the matter of health system queue jumping in Alberta, some instances of which have actually been uncovered by his efforts.

This was a dangerous moment for the government, it is said here. The government set up the inquiry with limited powers, headed by a judge who had retired from the bench, in order to avoid the risk of the independent and powerful judicial inquiry Ms. Redford had promised back when she was fighting for her political life.

But until Justice Vertes called Mr. Horne’s bluff by speaking out at his own inquiry, there was every chance the Alberta public could have been fooled, or at least uninterested enough not to distinguish between a real judicial inquiry and a commission that reports to the health minister.

By yesterday, Premier Redford had seemingly recognized the danger, undercut her minister and told the Canadian Press that if Mr. Vertes required more time, well, he should have it – but, please, could he wrap up the inquiry by the end of April? Still, one wonders what Mr. Vertes threatened behind the scenes to get the job done.

Meanwhile, negotiations with the province’s teachers continued to descend into recrimination and bitterness.

Also yesterday, it was revealed the government has all but declared war on teachers in an email sent by Education Minister Jeff Johnson to Alberta school trustees that stated: “Provincial negotiations are over. The incentives I offered are off the table. Further, be aware that any negotiated deals must include wage freezes for three years and no more than a 2 per cent increase in the fourth year. Anything else is simply not sustainable for our education system and will not be funded by government.”

It’s hard to imagine what the government hopes to achieve with a tactic that is a textbook example of bargaining in bad faith and which is certain to inflame rank-and-file teachers, possibly enough to drive them to the picket lines.

For the time being, however, the Alberta Teachers Association has determined to respond like grownups to Mr. Johnson’s provocation. They will launch an advertising campaign to make their case timed to coincide with next week’s provincial budget, which if it’s effective will infuriate the government further.

Meanwhile, Information and Privacy Commissioner Jill Clayton launched her investigation of Mr. Johnson’s earlier effort to spam 30,000 teachers with an official email that tried to go around their union bargaining committee.

Ms. Clayton’s effort is directed at finding out how Mr. Johnson got the email addresses, which are supposed to be private, not if he used them in violation of the province’s labour law – a question that comes within the purview of the toothless and employer-friendly Alberta Labour Relations Board.

For his part, Johnson maintained his first emails were a fine idea and he plans to continue sending them, then upped the ante with his inflammatory note to the trustees. This shot was reminiscent of his cabinet colleague Mr. Horne’s maladroit handling of negotiations with the province’s doctors – another fight that seems to have been left on the government’s back burner for the moment.

Well, there’s no defence like a good offence, one supposes, although that particular strategy will tend to keep the issue in the public eye, which in turn makes the government look ham-handed and incompetent.

So, notwithstanding the assistance unintentionally rendered to them by the elderly and possibly confused Dr. Flanagan, late of the University of Calgary and the Wildrose Party, the Redford Tories seem to be doing everything possible to ensure negative attention returns to them as quickly as possible.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Why is Alberta’s medical queue-jumping inquiry uninterested in dramatic 1990s case?

by David Climenhaga on February 26, 2013 in Alberta Health Services with 1 Comment

Dr. Ron Bridges of the Helios Wellness Clinic testifying yesterday in a screen grab from CBC’s broadcast. Below, Dr. Ciaran McNamee, who hasn’t been called to testify.

What are we to make of the fact Alberta’s preferential health care access inquiry has failed to call a witness who was at the centre of one of the most spectacular allegations of medical queue jumping in recent years?

Really, yesterday’s report by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that the often strangely passive inquiry has decided not to bother asking Dr. Ciaran McNamee to testify about what happened to his lung surgery patients simply boggles the mind.

Dr. McNamee told the CBC he is “willing to co-operate, in any form or fashion.”

But the inquiry’s lead council, Michele Hollins, told the national network that Dr. McNamee – who today works as a lung surgeon in Boston, where he also teaches at Harvard University – “is not being called to testify because it was decided his information was ‘dated’ and would provide little useful information about queue-jumping that may be occurring now.” (Emphasis added.)

Just wondering, but isn’t the point of holding an inquiry to look into what happened in the past, with the idea of preventing it from happening again in the future?

Back in the spring of 2011, the CBC revealed that Dr. McNamee, once the head of thoracic surgery at the University of Alberta Hospital, had sued the former Capital Health Region, claiming he’d been improperly hounded out of his surgical practice for complaining publicly about his patients’ long waits for surgery in the late 1990s. He also claimed CHR officials had improperly questioned his competence and even his sanity.

This was one of the incidents that led to calls for a judicial inquiry into bullying and intimidation of medical professionals in the Alberta health care system.

Dr. McNamee’s allegations became public at about the same time as Dr. Raj Sherman, now the leader of the Alberta Liberals, claimed in the Legislature that 250 people had died, many from lung cancer, while on a 1,200-name surgical waiting list in the 1990s.

In 2008, the CHR had been rolled into Alberta Health Services, the massive province-wide health authority that is only one baby step away from being an actual branch of the government.

“CBC News has learned that in the course of McNamee’s lawsuit, there was an allegation that his budget for lung surgery had been all, or in part, effectively taken over by other surgeons at the hospital,” the network reported, cautiously adding, “that allegation also was not proven.”

Unfortunately for those who would like to cast a light on what was going on in Alberta’s health care system back in the 1990s, the lawsuit was settled out of court in 2001 and Dr. McNamee was bound by a convenient non-disclosure agreement – unless he is subpoenaed to testify.

So what about it? “If the commission wishes to subpoena me, I will co-operate, and I will respect their mandate,” Dr. McNamee told the CBC’s interviewer. But the inquiry led by retired Justice John Z. Vertes, apparently, just isn’t all that interested.

In a blog post on the Alberta Liberals’ website, meanwhile, former party leader Dr. David Swann, who like Dr. Sherman is a physician, accused the inquiry of “deliberate avoidance of the most dramatic allegations of queue jumping.”

Dr. Swann can get away with a strongly worded statement like that without risk of being held in contempt, by the way, because the inquiry is not a real judicial inquiry with independent powers, but comes under the authority of the provincial government and reports to Health Minister Fred Horne. Likewise, Mr. Vertes, who has retired, no longer has the full powers of a judge.

Whether or not this has any effect on the actual independence of the inquiry, as suggested by Dr. Swann, is another matter entirely. But it certainly affects the public’s perception of the inquiry’s independence – and circumstances like the apparent willingness of Dr. McNamee to testify and the peculiar lack of interest by the inquiry to hear him, add to it.

“Many of his lung patients were ‘bumped,’ allegedly by other surgeons given preferential access, resulting, allegedly, in preventable deaths among his patients,” Dr. Swann wrote.

Meanwhile, as is well known, the inquiry has stumbled across some evidence of queue jumping in the here and now – the case of the mysterious ability of healthy patients of the $10,000-per-year Helios Wellness Clinic in Calgary to receive cancer screens in mere weeks that took all others years to get.

In testimony yesterday, a letter from senior AHS gastroenterologist Dr. Mark Swain entered as evidence said the health agency found “clear evidence” that one of the Helios doctors’ patients were the beneficiaries of preferential access to the tests.

In testimony reported by the Calgary Herald, Dr. Swain (referred to by the Herald as Dr. Mark Twain, in case you’re wondering, an easy mistake to make) told the inquiry Dr. Ron Bridges was assigned more endoscopy time than was normal for physicians who used the public cancer-screening clinic and benefitted from a “highly unusual” booking process. Dr. Swain’s explanation: “He’s not seeing sick patients.”

For his part, Dr. Bridges testified that he had no idea his patients were getting preferential access. Earlier, Dr. Bridges’ lawyer had tried unsuccessfully to prevent the report referring to patients being entered as evidence.

Well, this is all very interesting, if not exactly a shocker given last week’s testimony about the relationship between Helios and the public colon cancer-screening clinic located in the same Calgary building.

But if this inquiry is really supposed to get to the bottom of queue jumping in the health care system, it’s pretty clear Dr. McNamee needs to be called and asked about what happened back in the 1990s – even if that means discomfort for powerful people with connections to the Progressive Conservative government.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Redford to docs: There’s no raise, and you’re not getting it!

by David Climenhaga on February 7, 2013 in Alberta Medical Association, Alberta Politics with 5 Comments

The Alberta Progressive Conservative position on negotiations with the doctors explained. Yes, we’re just as confused as you are. Below: AMA President Michael Giuffre. Premier Alison Redford.

Every day, it just gets weirder and weirder.

The day before yesterday, we’re told, Alberta Premier Alison Redford waded into her health minister’s already strangely muddled negotiations with the province’s physicians to state that the only way the docs will get a raise is if the province goes back to charging health care premiums.

What’s more, she said in an impromptu news conference in Calgary, there’s no way that’s ever going to happen.

And what’s even more, she went on, there’s also no way they’re going to get a raise either. Period.

So that would seem pretty definitive, huh? There’s no raise, and you’re not getting it!

According to the Edmonton Journal, the president of the Alberta Medical Association said he was flabbergasted by the premier’s commentary and accused her of trying to derail the negotiations with the docs.

To Dr. Michael Giuffre’s observations we can only say that we’re all flabbergasted at the kind of stuff being emitted lately by Alberta’s famously brainy premier. As for derailing the negotiations, if what she said Tuesday is true, the obvious question is, What negotiations?

Other than the ones with Fred Horne, the health minister, that is, and heaven only knows what’s going on with those. Alert readers will recall that Mr. Horne has complained that Alberta’s doctors are paid $20 to $29 million more than all those other Canadian doctors, and seeing as the price of oil has unexpectedly gone and acted volatile again leaving Alberta facing the prospect of a deficit, there’s no way we can afford to pay them what he told them they had to take back in November.

So let’s all negotiate, he told them right after that, which brings us back around to Ms. Redford’s remarks on Tuesday.

Which leaves us all exactly where? Well, don’t ask me!

Like Dr. Giuffre, I’m flabbergasted. (Unlike Dr. Giuffre, I’m not going to waste time trying to use logic to pick apart Mr. Horne’s and Ms. Redford’s reasoning by adding up their sums and pointing out they’re talking about needing to raise a billion dollars to pay for a $25-million cost increase. The AMA president should know by now that telling voters “the numbers don’t make sense” just gives them a headache.)

Ms. Redford’s PC predecessor as premier, Ed Stelmach, got rid of Alberta’s health care premiums back in 2008, costing the government about $1 billion in revenue.

Actually, I have a confession to make: I’ve been flabbergasted at this government ever since Ms. Redford took over. Back in March and April 2012, as the April 23 provincial general election screamed down upon us like a freight train hauling carloads to soon-to-be-sworn-in Wildrose MLAs, Ms. Redford seemed to switch course every day, and drop the ball every time she did it.

Like everyone else, I started to think that as a result a Wildrose government was pretty likely.

Then she and her Progressive Conservatives won a very nice 61-seat majority, thank you very much.

It’s all very well to blame that on Pastor Allan Hunsperger, the Lake of Fire Guy, but really people, there had to be more to it than that. Anyway, somebody had to tell on him and make sure the media heard about it.

Now it’s starting to sound like déjà vu all over again – with outrageous revelations of illegal donations to the PCs, strange flip-flops almost every day in the negotiations with the docs, untested cabinet ministers being made to walk the plank, and bad ideas like legislating teachers into involuntary servitude for a couple of years surfacing regularly, not to mention a stream of broken election promises.

And then the demonstrably smartest premier in Canada starts saying stuff like her confusing comments about the doctors’ negotiations. There’s got to be a Youtube video in this: maybe … S**ff Premiers Say…

It’s getting so – well, flabbergasting – that one can only assume that if an election were held tomorrow … we’d all march out and vote in another Progressive Conservative majority!

Where do we go from here? Well, invitees gather in Calgary on the weekend for the Premier’s one-day summit to solve all of Alberta’s economic problems.

And talk about being flabbergasted, I’m still waiting for my invitation from Finance Minister Doug Horner, my MLA. What’s with that?

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Redford government floats risky scheme to impose contract on teachers

by David Climenhaga on February 6, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Education, Labour Relations with 11 Comments

An Alberta Teachers Association member gets ready to give an important lesson to the Redford Government. Alberta teachers may not be smiling quite as broadly as illustrated if the government imposes a contract on them by legislation. Below: Education Minister Jeff Johnson.

Trapped in a no-deficit, no-tax-increase cage of its own devising, with few ideas and a budget looming on March 7, the government of Premier Alison Redford has floated the idea of using legislation to impose a salary cap on Alberta’s teachers.

Education Minister Jeff Johnson has been shopping this brainstorm around to the province’s school boards to see who salutes and who heaves rotten tomatoes.

Needless to say, the Alberta Teachers Association was not impressed. ATA President Carol Henderson expressed shock and dismay at what Mr. Johnson’s been saying, warning that even running the idea up the flagpole puts the government’s relationship with the province’s teachers at risk.

The same kind of thing has been tried in both British Columbia and Ontario, she noted, and the results have hardly been auspicious.

In this, Ms. Henderson got it right. A certain amount of disdain for the collective bargaining process is normal nowadays among unionized professionals like teachers. But getting between them and a raise they both expect and believe they deserve is an entirely different matter.

Mr. Johnson’s press secretary, meanwhile, told media in Edmonton there’s been strong support for the scheme among at least some of the boards the minister has approached – which, by the sound of it, has been most of them.

No surprise there either, since it was back to chaotic local negotiations between school boards and teachers late last year after province-wide tripartite bargaining among the ATA, the boards and the government collapsed.

So rather than shouting at each other about market principles, the value of unions and broken promises, let’s just take a breath and think about what this really means in practical political terms.

Notwithstanding the inevitable angry rhetoric of people who hate unions and hate teachers, of whom there is no shortage in Alberta, the relationship between the Progressive Conservative government and the ATA has long been a very comfortable and productive one, if not quite cozy.

It probably overstates the case to call the ATA a branch of the PC Party, as has been muttered darkly from time to time in the pinker corners of Alberta’s labour movement, but it can certainly said that not only have many Alberta teachers voted Conservative for years, they have done so without discomfiting their leaders overmuch, with few exceptions. More than one Tory cabinet minister has ascended from the ranks of the ATA.

However, in last spring’s Alberta election, when it looked very much as if the charter-school-loving Wildrose Party was on the verge of wresting power from the PCs in the desperate final hours before April 23, teachers of all political stripes rallied to the side of the government and helped snatch its bacon from the flames.

In this – to the bitter disappointment of the opposition parties of the left and right – they were joined by unionized health care workers and government employees in large numbers.

So there can be no doubt that if the government, pleading poverty in the midst of oily plenty, now turns on the teachers and imposes a two- or three-year deal, it will be seen with some justice as a case of the government screwing the very people who saved its bacon.

Alberta teachers will likely respond with some kind of job action, as has been tried in Ontario by teachers dealt a similar hand by the Liberal government of outgoing Premier Dalton McGuinty for much the same reasons.

To wit, they will do things like refuse to participate in extra curricular programs, and loudly fight with the government about it, lending an air of crisis to a government that needs to project an image of calm if it is to survive.

Moreover, other public sector unions – every one of which is likely to have negotiations with the government or a public agency in the approximate time frame of this government’s life – will conclude they can no longer trust the Redford crowd.

This will ratchet up the sense of looming crisis already being amplified by the government’s very public fight with the Alberta Medical Association, which Health Minister Fred Horne also seems to be of a mind to continue.

And for what? A vain attempt to win back voters who have already left the Tory party, most likely forever, to join the Wildrose ranks? A favourable editorial in the National Post?

Supporters of imposing contracts by legislation within the government – who are not necessarily the government’s best friends – will argue that public sector unions don’t command the support of their own members, at least when it comes to whom to vote for. If we are honest with ourselves, we know that there is more than a little truth to this.

But in the event, it is said here, this is not likely to work the way advocates of legislation expect. More likely, public employees will ignore the half-hearted tacit advice of their leaders and not support the government coalition in 2015, either by returning to the Alberta Liberals and the NDP or by throwing caution to the wind and voting Wildrose for a change.

So it is a sure bet that, no matter what they say for public consumption, all of Alberta’s opposition parties are cheering the Tories on in this desperate enterprise. New Democrats, Liberals and Wildrosers alike stand to benefit significantly from the sense of crisis and disorder that is sure to follow such a bonehead play, and the votes that will directly come their way as a consequence of it.

Once such a policy is clear, moreover, every one of them will accuse the government of breaking another promise – this one of stable and predictable funding in education. Again, they will be quite justified.

As has been said here before, the Redford Tories would be smarter to be mindful of whom their friends are, run a deficit and proudly boast they are protecting public programs – all the while praying for the timely return of higher petroleum prices soon enough to accommodate their electoral schedule.

Of course, this would require them to go against an instinct for austerity and confrontation that is bred in Alberta Tory bones.

Can they put reason ahead of passion? We’ll likely see on March 7, when the Budget Speech is read.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Is Premier Alison Redford’s bitter fight with the docs about money, or control?

by David Climenhaga on February 1, 2013 in Alberta Economy, Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics, Health Care, Health Insurance with 6 Comments

Who’s in change here? Progressive Conservative MLAs get ready to supervise the work of an Alberta Health Services medical team while Alberta voters look on. Health officials, physicians and electors may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: AMA President Dr. Michael Giuffre; a space invader

Is the increasingly bitter fight between Alberta’s government and the province’s physicians just about money? It’s said here it’s more about who gets to control the health care system.

If you need evidence for this assertion, look no further than the fact just two and a half months ago Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne said he was going to impose a pay deal on the docs that would have seen their salaries keep on rising.

Premier Alison Redford is now traipsing around the province explaining that these same doctors are being paid too much – why, they get 20 to 29 per cent more than their counterparts anywhere else in Canada!

“Quite frankly, before I start asking Albertans to pay health care premiums, I want to make sure that we’re getting the best deal possible with our doctors,” Ms. Redford told supporters during a recent telephone town hall. “At the end of the day, I think that’s really where we start to save some money with respect to things like health care.”

This is the leader of the same government that just days ago was about to force the same supposedly overpaid physicians to accept an imposed agreement that included a 2.5-per-cent lump sum payment and cost-of-living increases in each of the next three years.

Naturally, the doctors didn’t think that was enough and screamed bloody murder when Mr. Horne moved to unilaterally impose the contract on them. But it still raises the question: If they were not paid enough in November, why is the same pay too much now?

For his part, Mr. Horne has since withdrawn that deal, denied he imposed anything, and returned to the bargaining table with the AMA, setting the stage for the current slanging match.

AMA President Dr. Michael Giuffre conceded on CBC radio yesterday that Ms. Redford’s percentages are essentially correct, but argued that the costs of hiring nurses, renting space and otherwise operating a medical business in boom-bust Alberta are also higher by roughly the same amount.

He couldn’t resist the highlighting the irony of the fact that back in November the Redford Government spent $130,000 of taxpayer money on radio ads to promote an imposed settlement that now seems to have become far too expensive.

Accusing the government of “slamming” and “vilifying” physicians, Dr. Giuffre assailed the premier’s “often-confusing and frequently misleading” comments about physician pay as alarming and not particularly helpful to the on-again negotiations with the docs. He suggested the government is unfairly demonizing physicians because it desperately wants to hold the line on a budget deficit burgeoning in the face of lower prices fetched by Alberta petroleum resources.

Of course, the bitterness between the government and the AMA may go back a little farther than that. Alert readers will recall that the AMA backed the wrong horse in the final days of last spring’s election campaign, when the association bought advertisements that assailed the government and all but called on voters to elect a Wildrose government. Rest assured Alberta’s PC elephant has not forgotten!

Still, if you consider for a moment that the government’s real cost-control fight with doctors may be about who is going to be the boss of the health care system, the emphasis on Alberta physician pay premiums over other provinces suddenly makes sense.

Look at this from the government’s perspective. If you cede control of the system to physicians, who obviously have a dog in the hunt, the chances you’ll ever get health care costs under control are, shall we say, diminished.

Not only are Alberta physicians generously paid, but the billing structure is highly advantageous to their financial health. So it should come as no surprise that in the background of this public fight over wages, Mr. Horne has been chatting with his counterpart in Ontario about ways to change the formula by which physicians are compensated.

But if the government proposes any change to the billing process, it is likely to be attacked by the AMA as dangerous to patients – and chances are good many Albertans will listen. Both the government and the AMA also know that if you asked the typical Albertan in the street whom he or she would rather have in control of the health care system – doctors or politicians – the answer is likely to overwhelmingly favour the docs.

Yet if the government can’t slow down the rate at which health system costs are rising, the PCs and Premier Redford are bound to come under increasing pressure from the Wildrose Party – which can promise without a shred of evidence or accountability that its privatization schemes will deliver fairer, cheaper, more efficient health care.

Ergo, the government’s simplistic but easy-to-sell attack on the AMA from its flank makes political sense while Ms. Redford’s brain trust tries to figure out how to wrest control of the system from physicians and put it in the hands of more easily controlled officials.

Come to think of it, this is what former premier Ed Stelmach was up to when his government created Alberta Health Services back in 2008, not that that worked out the way anyone expected.

Saying doctors are paid 20 to 29 per cent more is just easier to explain than making a complex case for restructuring the way routine health services are delivered to most Albertans, many of whom are focused on the complaint they can’t find a family doctor.

Even Albertans who understand that health care financing is a complex policy question may not connect the dots that this argument represents a strange flip-flop by the government from what it was saying just a few weeks ago.

With the AMA, whose members are not used to losing, darkly hinting that it may resort to legal action if the government won’t bow to its will, look for this fight to continue for some time yet.

But don’t be surprised if this doesn’t particularly displease Ms. Redford, Mr. Horne and Finance Minister Doug Horner.

After all, given its vocal position on the need for austerity, the Wildrose Party can hardly rush to the doctors’ defence and call for a big salary increase, and fighting with the docs at least makes it look as if the government is doing something to respond to the Opposition’s screams about the deficit.

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BudgetChoice.ca – a coercive push poll or the greatest thing since Space Invaders?

Scoffers may try to dismiss www.budgetchoice.ca, the government’s $57,000 online do-it-yourself deficit-elimination tool “as a particularly coercive push poll” intended to soften up voters for another round of cuts to the public service or maybe a tax increase, wrote commenter Tom Fuller after yesterday’s post.

“But I think it’s a stroke of genius turning the budgeting process into an on-line multi-player role-playing game,” Mr. Fuller went on. “Assuming my avatar (Chlorox, the Elf Warrior) I vote to cut services to children and seniors, and lay off everyone at Environment. For reducing expenditures by 23 per cent, I get 5,000 special bonus points, and can claim the magic axe of Steve West, lost for lo these many years. I haven’t had this much fun since I spilled the beer on my Atari and shorted out Space Invaders.”

My blogging colleague Dave Cournoyer apparently agrees, observing: “It simplifies the process, but it also works to demonstrate that with modest tax increases and minor cuts to the Legislative Assembly budget, and cuts to wasteful programs like Carbon Capture, the government could easily balance the budget without burning down the house. And I did all that as a Level 4 Dwarf with a Stockwell Day amulet. It earned me 430,000 Gold Katzs.”

Personally, I’m not a gamer, so I have no idea.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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