Laying It Out: If you can add cops to fight crime, you can add ambulances to save lives

By Scott Schmidt on June 11, 2022.

Six months removed from statistics showing Edmonton below the national average for violent crime for the first time in years, the city was directed by Justice Minister Tyler Shandro to develop a plan to tackle what he claimed to be an 11% crime spike in the downtown core. He gave the city two weeks.

Fitting then, that two weeks later when Edmonton Mayor Amarjeet Sohi unveiled the required plan — which, among other things, is to immediately put more officers on the street and into transit terminals — Alberta Health Services announced plans for an independent investigation into why an 86-year-old Calgary woman, after being mauled by three dogs, had to wait 30 minutes for an ambulance before dying from her injuries. That review is expected to take four months.

Considering it took less than a day to learn that while she laid there dying, the city’s EMS was under a red alert because no ambulances were available to go get her, how many months does it take to figure out we need more available EMTs?

It’s a trick question of course, since four months of review and investigation is assuredly going to recommend anything but spending money on more resources. So, hiring more EMTs and staffing more ambulances is likely out of the question already.

But the juxtaposition of these two stories reveals a lot about how completely broken our society is.

First of all, unless you think life is a Lethal Weapon movie, you already know police are a lot more “give us a call after something bad happens” than they are, “here I come to thwart the armed robbery in progress.” Short of cops linking arms up and down Whyte Avenue, how much impact do we really expect from an increased police presence?

Meanwhile, had a staffed ambulance been available to go get that poor elderly woman, she might very well have survived. And regardless of the gobbledygook we’ll be fed by AHS until we forget about her — Betty Ann Williams, by the way — at the very least we know for a fact an under resourced system failed her.

More cops won’t stop crime. More ambulances will definitely save lives.

Irrespective of this, many Albertans will still sit back while crucial public dollars are ineffectively thrown at policing budgets, while simultaneously devouring nonsense about fiscal responsibility when AHS’s third-party review reveals ambulances to be a luxury we can’t afford.

But why?

Why, in a province where everyone seems so quick to defend their tax dollars, do we allow money to be no object when it comes to policing ourselves, but frighteningly scarce when it comes to paying for something we all know in our hearts to be essential to a proper society, like, say, a damn ambulance when we need one?

The public recently had to lose its collective mind in order to keep funding in place that helps Type 1 diabetics pay for insulin pumps — cut initially to save a whopping $9 million. Why is it no one ever applies the same nickel-and-dime approach to police budgets, which are by far and away the largest operating expense for every single city and town?

Are we fiscal champs, or not? Of all the public services this province takes aim at, why do we allow policing to be the one budget we never scrutinize? In terms of fiscal sensibility, the concept is completely idiotic.

Shandro uses his position to essentially bully Edmonton into spending more money on police, knowing full well the lack of any real benefit. And AHS is going to waste a bunch of money on a lengthy review that needs all of three words to complete — “need more ambulances” — and those three words won’t even be in it.

The fact is, that woman’s death was not an isolated incident — it just happened to be so tragic, it caught people’s attention. But a lack of paramedic services (red alerts) has been occurring a lot lately.

If the province cared at all, a review would have been launched and long completed. But since a proper review would simply reveal what we already know — the province undermines public services as a general rule — it seems unlikely the United Conservatives would launch such a thing.

If the justice minister can apparently get more cops on the ground with a letter, surely the health minister could make similar demands with EMTs. But since those demands will never be made by this government, maybe Albertans should start asking themselves what their own priorities are, since our government’s are clearly out of whack.

Ideologies and political spectrums aside, how many Albertans would truly choose a province where a strong police presence is more important than a strong health-care system? None, I am sure, yet here we are.

I’ve often said we don’t need to make such choices, because we have ample resources to easily deliver all the things we need, but you’re either ‘fiscally conservative,’ or you’re not. If you accept that health care needs to operate within a budget, then the same should be said for policing.

Our premier (and assuredly whomever replaces him) never shuts up about reining in per-capita health costs, but attacks anyone who even discusses the idea of less funding for police services. His beliefs outrank the need for fiscal management, and ours should too.

If you believe Betty Ann Williams deserved an ambulance, then at what point should we care about the budget for them? Because if we just treated this like we do policing, the answer would be never.

Scott Schmidt is the layout editor for the Medicine Hat News. He can be reached at sschmidt@medicinehatnews.com