Rush for repairs exposes leaks in PC ship
As Premier Jim Prentice keeps trying to turn the Titanic around, we’re reminded forcefully that the old ship is still wildly off course.
At first, the premier’s actionfigure routine was impressive (no to licence plates, yes to Michener Centre — great stuff!)
But as the routine grows more familiar, it becomes a daily demonstration of how badly messed up the PC government is in so many areas.
On Friday, Prentice tackled flood relief. By tripling the staff who handle appeals of flood claims to 18, he revealed there were only six. No wonder 1,000 claims are still unresolved.
Also, by both approving and sharply altering big flood mitigation projects, Prentice implicitly acknowledged the anti-flood program had stalled out.
Details of his move angered Mayor Naheed Nenshi, who says the city had no advance notice of the province’s intent to shift from a water reservoir to a dry reservoir in Springbank.
Nenshi is not a politician that a Calgary premier wants to have offside during local byelection campaigns. But now he already is.
Overall, there’s no doubt that Prentice’s frantic pace is dictated by the three campaigns that will likely start next week.
Watching him race from problem to problem, the thought occurs that there should be at least one byelection a month in Alberta.
Then Albertans might actually get what they need.
It’s good news, for sure, that the PCs will finally move hard to solve the problem of so-called “bed-blockers” — patients who don’t need full hospital care, but are stuck in acute-care beds because there’s no long-term care available.
Then Alberta Health Services revealed it will halt the closure of nearly 1,000 long-term-care beds.
This was a shock. There has been talk of closures — Wildrose revealed some of the details — but AHS has never talked openly about such a plan.
At the very moment when one acute-care hospital bed in 10 is filled by a patient who actually needs long-term or alternate care, why were they closing any beds at all?
The government’s math on this has never made any sense. While closing beds, successive ministers have kept claiming more are being added.
Brian Mason’s NDP argues convincingly that it’s a kind of shell game. The province wants fewer expensive, fullystaffed beds and more of the lesscostly supportive-living spaces. Over time, the latter came to be counted among the former, blurring the fact that the shortage of full long-term care was growing worse. As a result, there is a crisis. Hundreds of people, mostly elderly, are now in expensive hospital beds. This, in turn, blocks sick people from emergency and acute care all over the province.
But the real bed-blockers here aren’t the patients — they’re the politicians and AHS officials who, despite a decade of promises, quietly followed a policy that made the problem worse.
One of the most dangerous figures for the PCs right now is Dr. Paul Parks, the fearless emergency ward doctor from Medicine Hat who has just released figures on the enormous medical and financial waste involved.
Dr. Parks terrified the Stelmach government by telling the truth about emergency ward horrors in 2009.
Now, he’s again menacing the PCs as they head to the polls.
Finally, the province will move on installing sprinkler systems in long-term-care facilities.
Residents in 444 of 657 facilities have no such protection. The province allowed this to happen, by refusing to mandate installation of a decades-old technology. Retrofitting the centres now will be enormously more costly.
It all shows that in politics, you can’t reform failures this serious without highlighting the very things you’re attacking.
Premier Prentice can only hope he has enough credibility to stay above it all. The byelections will show whether he does, or not.