Premier Smith discussed the possibility of a surgery waitlist guarantee for Albertans during live town hall event

Premier Danielle Smith held a recent virtual town hall event. Held on March 14, live on Facebook, the hour-long conversation touched on numerous topics. One of the first questions she received stemmed from the recently released provincial budget, asking her for her key takeaways.

She pointed to affordability, specifically the $100/month Affordability Payments, electricity supports and indexing of specific programs, AISH, income supports, and personal income tax system. She also talked about the reprieve on fuel taxes. “That’s going to be especially important on April 1 when the Federal Liberal/NDP coalition increase the fuel tax again. We will do whatever we can to make sure people aren’t feeling those costs by making sure we don’t have our own fuel tax in place.”

Premier Smith spoke about the surplus budget as key to being able to provide support to Albertans. “There’s only been four times in the last fifteen years that the government has run a surplus budget. That was really important to me, and I know it was important to our colleagues. When you have surpluses, you have choices. A surplus is also an indication that everything is going in the right direction. Not only are we finally seeing recovery in oil and natural gas prices but also the fact that we’ve got a record number of people coming to our province, that increase personal income tax revenue. The eight percent corporate income tax brought in record corporate tax revenue. After so many years of being on the downslide, things are really beginning to turn around.”

One question posed to Premier Smith circled policing. She agreed it was a big issue. She said a big part of the focus had to be mental health. “Almost every one of us has been touched by mental health and addiction issues in our families. It is devastating to watch somebody lose themselves in the throws of an addiction or a mental illness. This is why we have put so many resources into addressing this issue. We’ve increased our mental health budget. It was 87 million dollars when we first got in. It’s now $275 million a year. There was a $40 per day user fee for anybody trying to access a publicly funded bed for addiction treatment. We got rid of that. We look at this mental health and addiction crisis as being a healthcare issue, and we have to make sure that the first thing is getting people their lives back.”

Premier Smith said they are building ten recovery communities. “The one in Red Deer is 75 beds, fifty for men and twenty-five for women. They are partitioned. There’s a kitchen on either side. People who are going to go into recovery are going to have therapy in the morning and do chores in the afternoon, and vice versa. We are going to teach people how to shop, how to cook, and how to do basic repairs. They are going to take care of the facility. There will be a community garden. Whether a person needs a month, six months, or a year, we are going to get them back on the road to recovery.”

The Premier said the second focus is “shoring up” the sheriffs. “Sheriffs are only about one week short of the kind of training that other officers have. That’s a very easy gap to bridge.” She pointed to a thirteen percent increase in the Public Safety and Emergency Services department budget, led by Minister Mike Ellis. “(It’s) one of the few that got a double-digit increase. But we know that this is important.”

Premier Smith said Minister Ellis would be able to hire 235 more sheriffs. “He’s going to start a gang unit. He’s going to send officers to the border so that we can apprehend organized crime bringing drugs, human trafficking, (and) gun smuggling across the border. We’re going to fill those gaps so that people can feel safe again. This isn’t about just a law and order approach. This is about putting the right people on the street to assist with the policing but also connect people to the services that they need.” The Premier said their changes are being called the “Alberta Model” and said people are “coming from all over to see what we are doing here.”

One caller asked about caps on vehicle insurance rates and why they were removed, resulting in insurance companies skyrocketing their rates. Premier Smith said when they looked at the previous cap, they noticed that insurance companies raised rates as high as they could go, five percent, every year. “There was a twenty percent compounding rate that increased while the NDP was there. So, we took the cap off, and sadly, the insurance companies abused the freedom that they had. It’s unacceptable.”

The Premier said having a cap and allowing companies to increase rates “year after year” was not a good solution. “We needed to say stop. You’re (the companies) not going to be able to increase at all until we figure this out. This next year is going to be that fact-finding mission about what we need to do to be able to reduce them.”

Another topic brought forward was healthcare. A caller said they had been waiting two years for a hip replacement and asked if they could go to another province for the surgery. Premier Smith said she recently spoke with Dr. John Cowell, the AHS Administrator she hired to replace the AHS board. They identified 39,000 Albertans on the AHS waiting list, waiting longer than medically recommended. The Premier said that number quickly dropped by 4,000, down to 35,000. “He said at this rate, because we’ve got a lot of things ticking along, a lot of new partnerships that have formed, a lot of capacity that has been built, and our system is now getting back to being fully functional, he thinks we are going to eliminate that backlog within twelve months.”

The Premier told the caller that her two-year wait for a hip replacement was too long and addressed her question about going elsewhere for treatment. “We need to be able to give a guarantee. Last time I ran, I proposed the idea of a wait time guarantee and if you think that we should take a position where if we can’t get your surgery (done) within a reasonable period of time, we pay for you to have it done somewhere else. I would love to get your feedback on whether or not you think that would be a good policy. I share your frustration. Our system’s got to perform so much better.” The entire live event is available on Facebook by visiting Premier Danielle Smith’s page.