On February 23, David Swann offered his official response to the government’s Speech from the Throne.
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Introduction
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As Leader of the Official Opposition, it is my duty, my honour and my privilege to respond to the Speech from the Throne.
His Honour the Lieutenant Governor was kind enough to begin the speech by sharing some of his experiences with Albertans. These were the only inspirational words in the Speech from the Throne, and I am grateful for their inclusion, as I am for His Honour’s distinguished service to our province and our nation.
Values and Solutions
I’m grateful because inspiration is important. Alberta needs it, especially now, during this time of economic uncertainty and crisis in public health. A house divided cannot stand – nor can it provide the inspiration that fuels our evolution as a province and a people.
At this point, I believe Albertans would be inspired by a government that could actually manage the province. Concrete, pragmatic solutions – that would inspire a great deal more confidence in our leaders and our province’s future.
And yet here we are, in the midst of a universally acknowledged crisis in health care and gross financial mismanagement, and this government is preoccupied with internal division. A government working to save its own skin is a government too distracted to deal with real problems. Stopgap solutions are a recurring theme for this Tory government. Albertans deserve better.
Liberals have always focused on pragmatic solutions that work for Albertans, for now and for the long term. Our solutions are based not on quick fixes and more spending, but on thoughtful planning, scientific evidence and expert advice. During this challenging time, an Alberta Liberal government would protect people programs – including health care, education, continuing care, seniors care, employment supports and help for the vulnerable – while scaling back spending on extras.
There are ways to balance the budget without harming the average Albertan. We’d establish an independent commission to establish MLA pay and benefits. Wed cut government communications and travel, and welfare for private golf courses and horse racing. We’d reduce the size of government from 24 ministries to 17, and extend capital plan spending from three years to five. We’d save a billion dollars by scaling back public investment in carbon capture and storage, a promising but unproven technology with significant potential public liability.
Our focus, though, isn’t on cuts. It’s on investing in the province and its people programs – the essential services that ensure Albertans are healthy and productive, the services we all value most.
We’d start with health care – the primary service of government to the people. It’s difficult to appreciate the scale of the problems in health care unless you’re a patient with recent experience in the system, or a front-line worker who’s had to deal with the organizational nightmares caused by the creation of Alberta Health Services and the elimination of regional boards. Most Albertans don’t care how health care is managed – they just want a system that works. Quality, accessibility and cost-effectiveness; these are the measures of a good system and good governance.
Centralization of delivery doesn’t work. That’s why we would transition back to regional health boards and reinstate the Alberta Cancer Board and the Alberta Mental Health Board. It’s shocking to me that this government is finally introducing an addictions and mental health strategy, two years after disbanding these boards. Talk about taking three steps back for every step forward.
Professionals, colleagues and friends – especially during the past couple of years – have expressed to me their deep frustration with a system that has disregarded their career experience and made decisions that are simply wrong in terms of patient care and efficiency. Hundreds of patients have contacted the Official Opposition, outraged by delays in treatment and preventable loss of life across Alberta. These delays and deaths came despite the best efforts of our front-line professionals, who have been performing above and beyond the call of duty, fighting against the tide of incompetent management of the system. The H1N1 debacle highlighted the folly of major disorganization of the health system and inconsistent direction between Alberta Health and Wellness and AHS, resulting in preventable loss of life.
Disbanding the critically flawed model of AHS would just be a first step. We’d also return democracy to health care; our regional health boards would be half appointed, half elected. Local control is important because local health care professionals and citizens know the needs of their community best. What works in Edmonton doesn’t necessarily work in Lethbridge or Grande Prairie or Medicine Hat or Banff. Local control means better health outcomes for patients. Alberta Health Services is a failed experiment, one that’s contributed to the backlog in our emergency rooms. Returning to local control and delivery of health care will help clear up that backlog.
That’s only the beginning, of course. The next step is to build enough home care and long term care to provide the seniors currently occupying acute care beds with more appropriate care settings. Not only will this provide elderly patients with better care, it will also get them out of our hospitals, freeing up acute care beds and moving people out of emergency rooms faster.
In the throne speech this government talked about creating a thousand continuing care beds. They didn’t say how many of these beds will be true long-term care beds, which is what seniors really need. Nor did they say how many of these beds will be private beds, which many seniors simply can’t afford. The only acceptable long-term care is publicly funded and publicly delivered. Our seniors have contributed too much to be shafted by government during what should be their golden years.
What this province needs most is more doctors and nurses and other vital health care professionals. We’re short thousands. Demand has long outstripped capacity; in fact, 750,000 Albertans, about 20 percent of us, don’t have access to a family doctor. And now it appears that the Minister of Health, currently in negotiations with the medical profession, will drop the practice supports that keep physicians well if a contract agreement isn’t reached with government next month. This doesn’t send the right message to a valued professional group.
The shortage of health care professionals has contributed to the long wait times for emergency care and surgeries. It has driven overworked professionals into retirement or away from Alberta. And it has created undue levels of stress and anxiety within the health care profession, resulting in inevitable degradation of care.
In consultation with post-secondary institutions, the Alberta Medical Association, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta and the United Nurses of Alberta, an Alberta Liberal government would start training the next generation of health care professionals immediately by opening up more spaces in our post-secondary institutions. At the same time, we would need to support creative programs such as flex time, child care and alternate payment models to retain our current professionals and encourage the new crop of doctors and nurses to stay in Alberta after graduation.
A visionary government would also seriously address the impact of prevention on public health. Most politicians don’t pay much attention to prevention because its benefits often aren’t noticeable for years or even decades – long after politicians can personally benefit from a good prevention policy.
If previous governments had been more visionary, we wouldn’t be in a health care crisis today. So for once, why don’t we look beyond our own short-term, partisan interests, and invest in prevention?
What are the strongest determinants of health? Education and income. Compromising either contributes to more sickness, injury and premature death. This is why people programs are so important – they contribute to our overall happiness and prosperity, and they improve the bottom line of the health care budget.
Health education and measures to reduce accidents keep people healthy and save millions of dollars. An Alberta Liberal administration would restore and expand the prevention programs previous governments have allowed to stagnate. We would, for example, ban trans-fats to alleviate chronic health problems: heart disease, diabetes, cancer, liver disease. We’d outlaw smoking in vehicles carrying children. We’d pass legislation forcing ATV riders and cyclists of all ages to wear helmets. We’d design education programs to reduce workplace injuries, car accidents, children’s injuries and domestic abuse. We’d raise public awareness of the importance of vaccination.
At the very least, this government could take a look at Pulling Through, our Emergency Plan for the Emergency Room.
Step One: gather top-tier professionals to identify necessary short-term actions and monitor, in concert with AHS, the impacts of these actions in improving emergency care. They would also define early targets for improvement and staffing needs in ERs and hospitals.
Step Two: mobilize all available health care professionals, including the retired and recent graduates who haven’t yet found employment, with incentives for a short-term increase in workload.
Step Three: help Albertans navigate the health care system more effectively.
Step Four: immediately provide alternate long-term care settings, including lodges, assisted living spaces and extended care beds.
Step Five: extend hours for diagnostic imaging and lab testing.
Step Six: as staffing comes on-line, open all the mothballed acute care beds in Edmonton and Calgary.
Step Seven: Plan for the future, including the phasing out of AHS and a return to regional health delivery. And, once again, invest in post-secondary spaces to train and retain the next generation of health care professionals.
I’m a physician of 30 years and a former public health official; I wrote the plan; it will work. I would be delighted if you’d steal this plan, because doing so would help resolve the immediate crisis in our emergency rooms.
We understand, as do two-thirds of Albertans, that health care is in crisis. And Albertans understand, as we do, that it’s not a crisis of funding, but a crisis of poor management.
And yet there’s barely any mention of health in this throne speech. Bill 1, the government’s flagship bill, focuses on…expanding to Asian markets. Well, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea; in fact, our oil and gas policy recommends expanding to Asian markets, via a west coast pipeline and other incentives. But this bill doesn’t even go that far; it’s just a call to create a commission, just like last year’s Bill 1.
Last year we had a competitiveness committee, and we have yet to see a more competitive Alberta. This year we’ll have an Asia committee, and it’s not going to get one metre of pipeline or railway built. That’s the opposite of inspiration, the opposite of progress. There’s no innovation, no ambition, no inspiration. Just a government still hoping against hope that oil and gas revenues can save them from their own blunders.
Health is the top issue for Albertans, and clearly our most treasured people program. But there are other people programs that also need protection, protection sorely lacking in yesterday’s throne speech.
For example: last year, the government’s throne speech included a pledge to protect vulnerable Albertans. And yet PDD funding remained static, and impoverished at that. This year, there’s no mention at all about protection of services for people with disabilities. Should Albertans with disabilities be worried by this omission? They rely heavily on PDD and AISH. An Alberta Liberal administration would index AISH payments to cost of living, just like MLA salaries are. We’d also maintain last year’s increase to Family Support for Children with Disabilities, Reverse last year’s cuts to Child Intervention Services, and increase the budget of Family and Community Support Services.
Environment and health are closely related. While this government continues to put all its environmental eggs in one basket – carbon capture and storage – Alberta Liberals again take a sensible, pragmatic but ambitious approach to protecting our water, air, land and wildlife.
Our environment policy requires greater efficiency of water use across the board, particularly in the industrial and agricultural sectors. We’d clean up Alberta’s tailings ponds. We’d implement a no net loss policy to protect wetlands. We’d complete a provincial groundwater inventory and establish a credible, comprehensive water quality monitoring program – another idea you’ve accepted, and thank you for doing so. We’d eliminate the use of fresh water for deep well flooding.
An Alberta Liberal government would make real reductions in our greenhouse gas emissions by rejecting intensity-based targets and instituting a hard cap on carbon by 2017. We’d grow Alberta’s dependence on renewable energy, including wind, solar and geothermal. We’d invest heavily in public transportation and walking and cycling infrastructure. We’d improve Alberta’s air quality monitoring system and reduce Alberta’s dreadful asthma rates. We’d limit clear-cutting and increase the amount of protected park space. And unlike this government, we’d protect species like the grizzly bear and caribou by properly listing them as endangered.
We would do all this and more. What’s more inspirational to Albertans than the sight of our mountains, the sight and sounds of our wildlife, the taste of our freshwater? We must preserve all of this. It’s not ours to use up and destroy; it belongs to future generations as much as it does to us.
What about education? It’s an investment in our greatest resource, Albertans, and the very foundation of our prosperity, health and social progress. The government continues to make reassuring noises about infrastructure spending, but these promises ring hollow when communities such as Airdrie, Beaumont and others, places in desperate need of new schools, have been told not to hold their breath.
Alberta continues to embarrass the nation when it comes to high school dropout rates, and relatively few Albertans transition from high school to university or college. You can’t build the high-tech economy of the future without a solid base of highly educated citizens. This government broke its promise to freeze tuition rates. They’ve slashed grants and bursaries. This government’s policies are going to keep even more students from pursuing post-secondary education. The negative impact on our productivity, our economy, and our progress will be huge.
An Alberta Liberal government would provide stable funding to post-secondary institutions and also to school boards to reduce class sizes to those recommended by the Learning Commission and eliminate parental fundraising for classroom essentials. We’d fund the negotiated teacher salary increases due in September so that school boards don’t have to cut staff or increase class sizes. We’d end the freeze on supports for special needs students. And we’d maintain programs that help students at risk, including children in care, to earn their high school diploma. We’d also stop slashing scholarships and bursaries. And we’d restore training programs to help put unemployed Albertans back to work, as well as stabilizing their income supports. Compare that approach to that of the throne speech, which acknowledges Alberta’s unemployed citizens but does nothing to help them. In fact, this government cut their supports and funding for retraining last year.
Even Albertans fortunate enough to have jobs have to watch their backs under this government. Workplace fatality and injury rates are still far too high. Unsafe employers are still being rewarded with WCB rebates. If you want to reduce health care costs, how about doing something about unsafe workplaces?
A responsible government would expand the Employment Standards Code to include protections for farm workers. Two brave farm workers, Eric Musecamp and Darlene Dunlop, continue their decade-long mission to bring equal rights, including Occupational Health and Safety coverage and WCB coverage to paid farm workers. That farm workers remain unprotected is a unique travesty of human rights.
A responsible government would also conduct a long overdue and very thorough review of the Alberta Labour Code to ensure that our labour relations system properly protects collective bargaining rights. Our government should also be lobbying a lot harder with the feds on workers’ behalf to rectify imbalances in the EI program that put out of work Albertans at a disadvantage compared to workers in other provinces.
A strong workforce means strong, healthy families, a strong economy, a strong Alberta.
Let’s talk about savings. Alberta is one of the few jurisdictions in the world that rakes in billions of windfall dollars in petroleum revenues. And yet we’ve blown through ninety percent of this cash, saving less than ten percent of it for the future. The Alberta Liberals are the only party talking about long-term savings, and we’ve been doing so for years. A visionary, inspirational government would set aside a consistent percentage of oil and gas revenues and invest those revenues to ensure Alberta’s long-term prosperity; live off the interest, not the capital! The oil and gas won’t be around forever, but we can build sustainable prosperity if we start saving today. Another good Alberta Liberal idea, the Sustainability Fund, is helping Alberta get through this recession’s budget crunch. It’s time to take the next step and fund Alberta’s future.
Character
This afternoon I’ve talked a lot about the government programs that Albertans value. Albertans also value certain intangibles: character traits such as honesty and integrity. The actions of this government haven’t inspired Albertans with confidence with regard to these traits. During the past several months, Tory cronyism and their entitlement mentality have become all too evident, from the government’s attempt to curtail the power of the Public Accounts Committee to perennial scandals regarding expenses, salaries and bonuses. Our current leaders have become a little too comfortable with power, and they’re taking Albertans’ goodwill for granted.
That’s why, several months ago, the Official Opposition released our Clean Government Initiative, our plan to build the nation’s most accountable and transparent government. It begins with a pledge: a pledge signed by all members of the Official Opposition, a pledge to safeguard the public’s money, to eliminate conflicts of interest, to strengthen checks and balances, to invite Albertans back into the political process.
Of course a pledge doesn’t mean anything unless there’s action to back it up. Here are some highlights:
Albertans that vote deserve a tax cut. If our plan were enacted, any eligible voter who shows up at the polls would receive a $50 tax credit for doing so. An Alberta Liberal administration would recognize citizens for exercising their democratic rights.
An Alberta Liberal administration would establish an independent commission with binding powers to set MLA pay, benefits and bonuses. Albertans were justifiably upset when the government gave themselves hefty raises; we would make that kind of situation impossible.
We would ban corporations and unions from donating to political parties. I don’t believe that money should buy influence. Government should be accountable first and foremost to individual citizens, not organizations with deep pockets.
I have a very deep and abiding respect for concerned citizens who step forward at considerable personal risk to expose corporate and government wrongdoing. An Alberta Liberal administration would appoint an ombudsman with the power to certify genuine whistleblowers, and we would protect these whistleblowers from job loss and give them access to a legal fund to help defend them against malicious lawsuits.
The Clean Government Initiative also includes actions to increase ministerial accountability, reform elections and more. My greatest hope is that this plan will breathe new life into Alberta politics and restore some of the trust that politicians have squandered. Only forty percent of voters turned out at the last election; I hope this plan will give some segment of the remaining sixty percent a reason to get involved in democracy again.
Conclusion
Not everyone comes into this world with the same opportunities. Not everyone has a supportive family, or the simple good luck to find a decent job or avoid hard times. The power of civilization is that it gives us the ability to take care of each other. That’s why we support proper funding for people programs such as public health care, public education, social supports for the vulnerable and environmental protection – all the institutions and ideas that allow a society to grow and thrive, to maintain health.
Ask the average Albertan what she values, and she’ll probably list what most of us have in common: decency, compassion, honesty, love and family. Ask her about what she values about government, and she’ll probably list public health care, public education, and supports for people going through tough times. These values are universal. Deep down, the vast majority of Albertans share them, because by our very nature human beings are communal; we take care of each other because we learned through hard experience that we must, in order for our civilization to survive and thrive.
My parents inspired me with two powerful lessons: tell the truth. Take care of each other. Today I’ve told the truth as I see it: that we all have a duty to take care of each other and the world we inhabit. During hard times, there’s a terrible temptation to solve short-term problems by slashing budgets and relaxing environmental protection standards, while ignoring the human cost of such decisions.
You can’t assign monetary value to human health and happiness. They’re priceless. Alberta is wealthy enough, our people are smart enough, our economy is strong enough, to support the vulnerable and to ensure that all Albertans continue to benefit from the people programs we value most.
Mr. Speaker, this is the third and final time I’ll rise to respond to the Speech from the Throne as Leader of the Official Opposition. It’s long past time to embrace a new generation of leaders, Albertans with new ideas, new drive, new passion. Alberta Liberals are unified in our desire to form a moderate, pragmatic, common-sense government that speaks to the values most Albertans hold dear. We want to be the ones delivering the throne speech and listening to your criticism – not because we seek power, but because we genuinely believe there’s a better way. Albertans have sacrificed too much, worked too hard, invested too much faith to let them down with half-measures and short-sightedness any longer.
It has been an honour to speak out on behalf of Albertans who share moderate, mainstream, small-l liberal values. My thanks to them for their remarkable support and good wishes.