blog | Mar 16, 2023
A deeper reading of Budget 2023 suggests that multiple futures are being claimed and contested: political and electoral futures, as well as ideological and existential ones. How each of these future battles is playing out matters significantly for Alberta’s future, not least in the unanswered question: “Whose future?” In this article, Parkland Institute’s research managers Ian Hussey and Rebecca Graff-McRae break down the possible futures at stake in the lead-up to the spring election and its political aftermath.
blog | Dec 16, 2022
After months of delays, the official handover of community laboratory services from Alberta Precision Laboratories to DynaLIFE took place on December 5. With that, the political tug-of-war within and over Alberta’s medical laboratory system enters yet another round, but Albertans are the ones who will lose out. This op-ed appeared in the Edmonton Journal on December 16, 2022.
research | Jan 30, 2022
Drawing from financial data, lab professionals’ experiences, and hundreds of pages of files obtained through a freedom of information (FOIP) request, this report examines the serious implications of the UCP government’s plan to contract out the majority of Alberta’s medical lab services to a single for-profit corporation — DynaLIFE.
research | May 06, 2021
Time to Care: Staffing and Workloads in Alberta’s Long-term Care Facilities by Parkland research manager Rebecca Graff-McRae reveals that many seniors continuing care centres are chronically understaffed and unable to meet the basic care needs of seniors.
blog | Mar 04, 2021
The compounded impact of years of cuts will be catastrophic. The United Conservative government is cutting or privatizing services that Albertans rely on in order to pay for their 33 per cent tax giveaway to large profitable corporations and for their mistakes of cancelling the crude-by-rail contracts and gambling on Keystone XL. On par with Premier Klein’s massive cuts in the late 1990s, the result will be deep structural changes and a legacy of lasting damage.
blog | Sep 24, 2020
This government does have a plan for our health care and it is one that will serve corporate interests instead of the public interest. Zooming in on the UCP’s health omnibus Bill 30 provides crucial pieces in the puzzle of the UCP privatization agenda. This is part one of a series of blog posts about the privatization of health care in Alberta.
blog | May 04, 2020
Jason Kenney has celebrated the life-saving contributions of medical lab professionals in Alberta but just a few months ago he discussed plans to privatize the province's labs and label lab workers as not "frontline" medicine. Rebecca Graff-McRae digs into the current work of medical labs in Alberta, their recent political history, and what might become of them post-pandemic.
blog | Apr 14, 2020
In his Address to Albertans on April 7, Premier Jason Kenney quoted Franklin Delano Roosevelt without naming him. In this blog research manager Rebecca Graff-McRae takes a deeper look at some of the context and themes of Roosevelt's "fear itself" address to find some instructive historical parallels, and some even more stark contrasts.
research | Jan 21, 2020
This report looks at whether introducing a "basic income" is an effective policy response to address the changing nature of work, including increasing employment precarity, labour market restructuring, and job loss due to automation.
research | Jan 31, 2019
This report analyzes and compares the record of recent NDP governments on health care in five provinces: Ontario, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Nova Scotia, and examines briefly the health care policies of the Alberta NDP government since 2015, highlighting points of intersection—and contrast—with the five provinces examined.
