UCP needs to focus on Albertans’ needs, not their internal drama, says Phillips

NDP MLA for Lethbridge West Shannon Phillips says the UCP needs to be focusing on the needs of Albertans, and not their internal drama.

The MLA said in a phone interview Friday that she’s hearing as she knocks on doors in her riding that constituents feel the same about the UCP whose leader premier Jason Kenney said this week he is resigning from that party leadership position.

Both she and Lethbridge East NDP candidate Rob Miyashiro have been visiting constituents’ homes for months in preparation for the next provincial election, expected to be in the spring of 2023.

“There’s a lot of drama and a lot of uncertainty and what’s clear is what Albertans are in for over the next period of months or even up to a year is a government that is not focused on Albertans. If there’s one thing that’s clear out of this whole mess, it’s that the UCP are going to focus on themselves and their own internal drama, rather than the health care, the affordability crisis, the growing and diversifying the economy” that residents need them to focus on, said the MLA.

“All of those problems are going to get worse as they focus on themselves,” added Phillips.

Phillips said the UCP needs to solve their own problems.

“Certainly the MLA for Lethbridge East has been locked in a room with all of these various self-absorbed soap opera characters trying to organize their own internal drama and meanwhile, we have 43,000 people in Lethbridge without a family doctor and absolutely no plan to fix it. We have emergency rooms that are over-run, we have a wait list for surgeries that are tens of thousands of people long. We don’t even have a walk-in clinic in Lethbridge and yet, we do have a UCP MLA but he is busy worrying about the definition of ‘resign’, locked in a room for entire days on end. So none of those problems are going to get solved with the UCP approach because they’re more worried about themselves than ordinary Albertans.

While as many as 11 new doctors are expected to be working in the city this year, that won’t solve the physical problem here, said Phillips, because in the first three months of 2022, there were 13 fewer registered in the city.

Phillips said she is sometimes doorknocking three or four times a week and and two nights ago, she said not one person she talked to said they care about “UCP internal drama, I expect they are sick of hearing about it. They want people in Alberta politics to focus on health care, on affordability, on economy and they’re not seeing that from the UCP. I know Rob Miyashiro is hearing the same thing over in Lethbridge East.”