AHS is to blame for our problems
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193.17848
Summary
In this episode, Alberta s premier, Jason Kenney, takes questions from the floor of the Alberta House of Commons about his leadership of the province's health care system, and the role of MLAs in the process.
Transcript
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I hold Alberta Health Services accountable. I hold that. We gave them a lump sum of money
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and said, run health care for us. And we were told, let the experts be in charge.
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They've got it all figured out. They've developed integrated partnerships across the country
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with their public, the chief medical officers of health. They also have their own COVID
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scientific committees that were giving advice to government. And I think that, to be fair to
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Premier Kenney, he's a brand new government coming in, brand new leader. He'd been focused on federal
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issues for most of his career. He's brand new in health. And they were already beginning to see
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that they had problems in health. But then 10 months into his mandate, he gets hit with a global
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pandemic. And he's looking around, seeing what the rest of the world is doing. And these guys are all
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saying, we're the experts. We know what we're doing. And so he trusted them. I think that when
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the government fired Verna Yeo, that was pretty clear that we needed new leadership and a change
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of direction. And I think that the fact that the Premier lost his position shows that it was an
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error when vaccine exemptions or vaccine mandates came in. So I think that there has already been
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that the ultimate accountability is the leader at the top, who was ultimately responsible for making
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that decision, is not there anymore. A couple of his close allies in making that decision,
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they're also taking a back seat. There are others who have been speaking openly about how they were
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fighting behind the scenes. And I appreciate the fact that they did do that. But rank and file MLAs
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really didn't have a role in making these decisions. And that's one of the problems. That's one thing we're
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fixing, is that we're changing our policymaking process so that MLAs know our direction of government
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right from the beginning. And they get to tell us right from the beginning if we're going in the right
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direction, rather than announcing the policy, and then bringing them in at the end. So that's going
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to, I think, solve a lot of problems. But I must tell you, I believe that Alberta Health Services is
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the source of a lot of the problems that we've had. They signed some kind of partnership with the
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World Economic Forum, right in the middle of the pandemic. We've got to address that. Why in the world
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do we have anything to do with the whole World Economic Forum? That's got to end.