Rebecca Graff-McRae

The Slow Death of the Alberta Advantage

Saskatchewan just raised its minimum wage to $15, which means Alberta now officially shares with our neighbour the dubious honour of having the lowest minimum wage in Canada. As the “Alberta Advantage” dies a slow death amid low wages and public services in crisis, Albertans might need to ask themselves who is taking advantage of its demise.

• minimum wage
• Alberta Advantage

Misleading Narratives: Pay-to-play queue-jumping won’t fix surgery wait times

This blog post critically responds to a recent Calgary Herald opinion piece on surgical wait times in Alberta. It shows how spending taxpayers’ money in private surgical centers not only failed to resolve the issue but also made it worse. The post also presents evidence-based solutions to reduce wait times in the public system.

• health care
• privatization

Method in the Madness: The UCP’s plan for Alberta

So much has been happening in our politics that Albertans can be forgiven for feeling disoriented. It’s easy to focus on the latest bombshell as previous pronouncements fade. But it’s important to take a step back to see what patterns emerge. When we do, we find that the government’s flurry of activity indicates something more methodical is going on.

• Alberta government
• UCP

Mirror, Mirror: What’s Fair about the 2024 Budget?

Is the Alberta we are hoping to build made possible by Budget 2024? How will we meet the immediate and long-term needs of a rapidly growing province, in a rapidly changing political, economic, and environmental context? When we look in the mirror, what Alberta do we see?

• alberta budget

Welcome to the New ‘Alberta Advantage’: Pre-budget address promises dawn of perma-austerity era

Premier Smith’s pre-budget address announced the dawn of an era of permanent austerity and chronic underfunding for the province. Maybe someone should’ve explained to the UCP that the goal of ending the fiscal roller coaster was always to land at the middle, rather than getting stuck at a permanent bottom. This blog analyses why Smith decided to run this particular play — and why now.

• alberta budget

Right Thing, Wrong Reasons: De-privatizing community laboratory services in Alberta

AHS 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

From 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

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.

• Budget

Albertans the Losers as Community Lab Services Privatized

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.

Misdiagnosis: Privatization and Disruption in Alberta’s Medical Laboratory Services

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.

• health care
• privatization