From the Editor: A health crisis by design

By Scott Schmidt on January 24, 2026.

It has been 977 days since the 2023 general election in Alberta, which means it’s been 887 days since Premier Danielle Smith’s UCP government promised to have fixed the health-care system.

For someone with experience in media – and someone who once crossed a picket line to keep the Calgary Herald flowing – you’d think she’d have picked up a better sense for deadlines. Albertans were quoted a specific timeframe, one Smith never had to offer, and the job has now surpassed that eleven-fold.

For good measure, they aren’t just two and a half years behind schedule on a three-month project, they’ve spent the entire time in the demolition phase. The only proverbial walls they’ve built are formed into a maze no one can navigate, and any areas of the foundation that were rotting have been covered over with a new health minister who has “every tool” at their disposal but can’t find anything except a hammer.

At what point does the conversation shift away from, “What are you doing to fix this,” to “Why are you going out of your way to make this worse?”

The wellbeing of the people is unquestionably the most important component of a strong and prosperous society. And the two most important components of wellbeing are health and education.

In Canada we’ve known since 1961 that in order to have the best possible version of health care, it needed to be publicly funded, and we’ve seen the results. One of this country’s values that Canadians hold closest to their hearts is health care.

We’ve even had a front-row seat to a country with a privatized system, so we have undeniable proof ours is both better and less expensive. Unless that changes, you aren’t going to convince people that paying out of pocket for something as important as health is a good thing, not even with the ever popular promise of lower taxes.

And therein lies the entire point.

If you want to convince people they need to pay out of pocket for health care, you have to convince them the public system is broken. And since it was never actually broken, someone had to break it.

Why else would they spend all their time on a confusing operational restructure that every single member of the health-care profession said was a bad idea? Why would they stand around during an unprecedented hospital crisis claiming to be handling it, all while telling you hundreds of doctors are wrong to even call it that?

It’s because confusion and crisis are the point.

If they aren’t, then this is one of the more egregious displays of government incompetence in Alberta history. Right? It’s an utter failure of “fixing the system in 90 days” by a government that has no earthly clue what it’s doing, or it’s a very successful attempt to undermine a public system in order to usher in privatization.

Before you place your bet, remember the public system is currently in the toilet and the only real solutions implemented by the province are private clinics and the promise of two-tiered health care. Gee, what mystery.

They will forever cling to the raft of ‘wait times’ and expect you to do the same, but this can’t be said enough: if they had actual evidence of privatization helping wait times, they would pour it on you all day, every day. There isn’t any. We already know two-tiered health care is exactly that, two levels of care, with the vast majority on the bottom bunk.

It’s been proven wait times get worse for most people. It’s been proven the private tier pulls vital resources from the public tier leaving health-care workers on the public side overworked, overstressed and more likely to exit that side of the system.

If COVID didn’t convince you the health of your neighbour has a profound effect on your life, then congratulations on all your cash, but whether we like it or not, a collective wellbeing is crucial for individual wellbeing. We simply cannot achieve that by further cutting massive chunks of the population out of high-quality, high-access services.

The only way to come close to achieving a balanced two-tier system is the exact same as leaving it as is: properly fund the public system. The jurisdictions Smith and the UCP throw out as having two-tier care either aren’t actually doing it the way Alberta plans to (see New Brunswick) or they first and foremost properly fund and prioritize the public side. And no, the claim that Alberta’s government is doing that doesn’t make it so. People are dying in ERs and doctors are sounding alarms, but they say everything is under control.

If public health is top priority, imagine No. 2.

And it’s not an issue of expense, so don’t let them convince you it is. Health care and education are the most important government expenses and therefore should be the last budgets to see penny pinching.

Besides, for all those who think government debt is the biggest threat to the future, public systems are way cheaper – the U.S. spends twice as much per person as Canada does, so stop trying to defeat math. People who aren’t healthy, or aren’t educated, tend to become pretty expensive on the system in other ways as well, so the argument of funding is nonsense.

The only people who truly benefit from private health care are those who profit off it. That should be innate for every Canadian at this point.

Danielle Smith however, believes everything should be a commodity, including people’s health. She really believes Albertans agree.

Is she right?

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

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