
Rebecca Graff-McRae
Rebecca Graff-McRae completed her undergraduate and doctoral studies at Queen’s University Belfast (PhD Irish Politics, 2006). Her work, which interrogates the role of memory and commemoration in post-conflict transition, has evolved through a Faculty of Arts fellowship at Memorial University Newfoundland and a SSHRC post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Alberta. She has previously worked with the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland and Edmonton City Council.
Twitter: @PoliScIrish
Right Thing, Wrong Reasons: De-privatizing community laboratory services in Alberta
blog | Aug 29, 2023AHS is ending its contract with DynaLIFE and transferring it to Alberta Precision Labs, the public provider of medical laboratory services. The move to bring community lab testing back in-house under APL is a necessary step in the right direction, one that advocates and workers have been calling for from the beginning. But it is merely delivering first aid for a hemorrhaging patient. This blog post discusses a series of critical questions that need to be answered if we want to understand what the next step for Alberta’s laboratory services should be.
Hate to Say I Told You So, But…: Laboratory Services as the Canary in the Privatization Coal Mine
blog | May 20, 2023From the decision to cancel the Edmonton Hub Lab to the handout of services to DynaLIFE to unacceptable wait times for routine community collections, the handling of medical lab services by the UCP government has been a litany of entirely predictable disasters. Worse still: rather than the product of mistakes, these disasters are the inevitable result of deliberate policy choices on the part of the UCP. With the days of this election campaign ticking down, the contending parties are not talking about labs. But they should—and should, for a change, listen to what lab workers have to say.
Whose Future?: What the Alberta Budget Says About the UCP’s Priorities Pre-Election
blog | Mar 16, 2023A 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.
Albertans the Losers as Community Lab Services Privatized
blog | Dec 16, 2022After 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.
Misdiagnosis: Privatization and Disruption in Alberta’s Medical Laboratory Services
research | Jan 30, 2022Drawing 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.
Time to Care: Staffing and Workloads in Alberta’s Long-Term Care Facilities
research | May 06, 2021Time 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.
Alberta Budget 2021: Tax Giveaways for Corporations, Service Cuts for Albertans
blog | Mar 04, 2021The 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.
Reading Between the Lines on Bill 30
blog | Sep 24, 2020This 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.
Alberta lab services: from guinea pigs to heroes (and back again?)
blog | May 04, 2020Jason 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.
Jason Kenney's pandemic politics
blog | Apr 14, 2020In 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.