Western Standard - 'No tax-cuts... Alberta must stay disciplined'

00:00:00.000 Good evening Western Standard viewers and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show of the

00:00:23.500 Western Standard. It is Thursday, December the 11th. As 2015 closes out, you could say that it

00:00:32.460 has been a tempestuous year for Alberta politics and especially for Premier Daniel Smith. A quasi

00:00:39.340 agreement with the Prime Minister over pipelines that may or may not lead anywhere. Separatists 0.97

00:00:45.820 in her party and out of it who see pipelines as a litmus test of leadership. Where will that go?

00:00:55.100 The support was solid at the party conference three weeks ago but there were boos.

00:01:01.740 Teachers legislated back to work and in response the Alberta labour movement takes on the government

00:01:09.020 with a total of 21 recall procedures initiated already, including that of Premier Danielle Smith.

00:01:17.740 And creeping progress on healthcare. When people were hoping for, and to be fair, what was promised

00:01:25.340 was quantum improvement three years ago. And of course she is famous now for using 1.00

00:01:31.580 the notwithstanding clause four times in three years. The miserable weather outside

00:01:39.340 MacDougall House here in Calgary could almost seem like a metaphor for the Daniel Smith

00:01:47.420 government as the year ends. But what does the Premier think? Let's find out.

00:01:54.300 Well, thank you for this, Premier. My pleasure. Good to see you.

00:01:57.340 Well, it's good to have you on the show. It was kind of you to do it.

00:02:01.260 Madam Premier, may we start with health education and pipelines. Three quick questions in that order.

00:02:07.980 Yesterday you announced significant funding for assisted living and one of the purposes was to

00:02:15.820 free up acute care beds in hospitals which were occupied by people who needed care but not hospital

00:02:22.300 care yeah um all of that is great but i remember our first interview when you had just been uh

00:02:30.220 become premier and you said this is what we're going to do we're going to get people out of the

00:02:34.460 hospitals and into assisted living and here we are and we're announcing today yesterday that

00:02:42.700 we're going to do this again um when are we going to do the grand openings on these things well the

00:02:51.020 thing that we had to do is create the authority to make some of these decisions remember when we

00:02:57.180 first started AHS controlled everything they were the purchaser the provider the evaluator

00:03:03.500 they contracted with themselves contracted with others and we didn't really have line of sight

00:03:08.140 into what was happening in the hospitals when Jason Nixon became the minister who was the lead

00:03:14.220 on September 1st one of the first questions he asked was how many beds do we pay for in continuing

00:03:20.540 care and how many of them are empty and the answer was they didn't know what was happening was that

00:03:27.020 they didn't keep track of this if the bed opened up somebody made a phone call and somebody was

00:03:31.980 supposed to keep track of it we he ended up having to hire a call center to figure out how many open

00:03:37.180 beds that we had we've now since automated that there's going to be a portal that comes out very

00:03:41.680 soon so that was one of the changes that needed to be made we were also told that there were about

00:03:46.640 460 people who were living in a hospital who needed long-term care. Well, that number turned

00:03:53.660 out not to be true. It was closer to 2,000. And so one of the first things that we did is looked

00:03:59.100 at our 16 acute care hospitals to find out where the problems were. There were some hospitals in

00:04:03.580 the Edmonton area where 40% of the acute care beds were filled with alternative level of care

00:04:09.720 patients. We just didn't have that information until Jason went in and started asking for it.

00:04:14.340 See, it is the Fraser Institute adage, if it matters, measure it.

00:04:18.440 So we started measuring it.

00:04:20.220 And as a result, we're now down to less than 1,000 in our 16 acute care hospitals.

00:04:25.560 We're bringing the Edmonton area down into alignment with focus elsewhere.

00:04:28.500 Where did you put them?

00:04:29.400 I mean, it's great that you've moved them out of the hospital.

00:04:31.360 Do you mean you had these places that they could have gone just sitting empty?

00:04:37.820 We had some beds, yeah, that were sitting empty that we were paying for.

00:04:42.340 and we've had a we had to to have a conversation with our service providers saying we need to find

00:04:48.880 places for these individuals some of them are very complex there were seven people who'd been

00:04:53.320 in hospital for a thousand days or more and if we add it up it was a collective 18 years of them

00:04:59.260 being in hospitals we had to find dedicated um places for them to support their complex needs

00:05:05.120 when we say complex some have a dementia or mental health issues some have addiction issues

00:05:10.060 some have anger management issues. Some of them are senior, some of them are not senior. These

00:05:14.360 things all have to be dealt with. But our hospitals can't just be a catch-all for a difficult to place

00:05:20.040 patient. We've got to find ways to place those patients. We discovered some patients were in

00:05:24.480 hospital because the long-term care facility wouldn't take smokers. Well, how efficient is it

00:05:30.460 to have nurses and doctors rolling somebody down for a smoke break? Not very. So that's another

00:05:35.340 conversation we had to have with our service providers. So those are all things that we needed

00:05:38.840 to do is to make sure we were making use of our existing beds, finding ways to pay a proper

00:05:46.080 support for those who were complex. And now we just have to build a whole lot more. We're probably

00:05:50.600 about 3,000 beds short of those who need long-term care. And when do you think that you're going to

00:05:56.300 be able to have those 3,000 beds added to the inventory? There's a couple of things that

00:06:02.100 Minister Nixon is doing. One is repairs on existing beds. So there's about 800 that will

00:06:07.280 be brought on stream there's another 1500 that are currently in operation so those will come

00:06:11.540 on stream this year and then every year uh it's this year like 2025 26 2026 okay yes coming year

00:06:18.840 so um then every year after we're going to be investing uh 1500 beds a year until 2030 that's

00:06:25.460 the kind that's the kind of pace that we need in order to to keep up but the other part is is the

00:06:30.620 is the culture that we're trying to create and the structure we're trying to create is we know

00:06:35.580 people want to live at home in their own homes for as long as possible. So let's begin with

00:06:43.320 giving the wraparound supports with home care and personal care and renovations. And then let's see

00:06:48.840 if we can develop a kinship care program. So maybe they can move in with a daughter or son. And then

00:06:54.740 you can move into independent living with assist. And then the continuum goes on to the round-the-clock

00:07:00.800 care and so if we can keep people in their own homes as long as possible that that really should 0.52

00:07:06.480 be something that's going to be beneficial not only for taxpayers but i think more importantly

00:07:11.120 for the the person receiving the care themselves so we are well on our way and we just wouldn't

00:07:15.280 have been there if we hadn't made some of the structural changes that we did september first

00:07:19.200 well let's talk about structural changes uh yesterday i was speaking with a nurse real

00:07:24.640 person and not one of these you know people you invent to make a point real person and her question

00:07:33.120 was i know we need change but what's it going to look like when it's done why will it work better

00:07:43.120 can you explain what it is that danielle smith is trying to do with health well i can say that 0.93

00:07:48.880 the restructuring is now done and so what rather than have a single authority responsible for

00:07:55.440 everything what we're going to now have is that alberta health services will be responsible

00:08:00.880 for the facilities they run on our behalf they they run 107 facilities and their job will be

00:08:07.120 to improve the patient experience from the moment you walk in the door to the moment you receive

00:08:11.520 treatment to the moment that you're discharged their job will also be to maximize the the use

00:08:16.800 of their surgical theaters. We've been upgrading our surgical theaters and many of them sit empty.

00:08:21.120 Why was none of this possible under the model that you inherited?

00:08:24.640 I think lack of focus perhaps because you had AHS who was also managing Covenant Health and AHS

00:08:30.800 was managing 50 different charter surgical centers and AHS was determining whether or not we would

00:08:35.520 have international medical grads and AHS was running the public health system and AHS was

00:08:40.320 running long-term care. So it's a focus issue. So now they will be focused on

00:08:45.180 running the 107 facilities that are under their purview and we will have

00:08:50.640 under our primary and preventative care, we'll be making sure that everybody is

00:08:56.280 attached to a family doctor. That's going to be a separate area so we can do

00:08:59.700 international recruitment to make sure we have enough doctors and nurses so that

00:09:03.560 everybody has a family practitioner. The long-term care will be a separate entity

00:09:07.160 and mental health and addiction will be a separate entity.

00:09:09.040 what are the new incentives that are going to make the individuals uh i mean there was a sorry

00:09:15.120 story you told me earlier about the the beds being available but nobody thought to pick up the phone

00:09:20.400 and let anybody know clearly somebody was was was not on top of their job okay we have a new

00:09:26.720 structure yeah what are the incentives that are going to keep officials well the notion that we

00:09:33.120 have is funding following the patient to the facility that's best able to give them the

00:09:37.840 treatment and one of the reasons we know this will work is when we look at our charter surgical

00:09:42.640 facilities and there's 50 of them we pay them based on the surgeries they do right and as a

00:09:47.440 result they've gone from doing 40 000 surgeries when we first started to 65 000 surgeries at the

00:09:53.360 same time ehs has just gotten back to the level of surgeries that we started doing you know that we

00:09:59.200 were doing in 2019 even though they've had three and a half billion dollars more so everyone is

00:10:03.280 now going to be paid on the basis of the surgeries that they do especially on the elective side

00:10:08.480 and we think that that's going to increase the number of surgeries that are done i'll tell you

00:10:13.600 an example of what i think will happen in practice um if you want to go look at the humber river

00:10:19.040 model it's a public hospital in ontario and what they realized is that if they gave a surgeon

00:10:25.440 two operating room suites in the same eight-hour block they could get way more production out of

00:10:31.360 those operating room suites because a lot of what happens in hospitals is downtime you go and do your

00:10:36.000 surgery then you sit back and wait for 45 minutes until the surgery until the operating room is is

00:10:42.720 re-established with the the patient in there and then you go in so our typical unlike what the

00:10:47.120 dentists do completely go back from forth between the rooms so and i'll tell you what happens so

00:10:51.360 normally you might get four surgeries done in a surgical time block in a public hospital in

00:10:55.680 Alberta right now. Humber River, they did 14 in the same eight-hour time block. So that's the kind

00:11:01.840 of thing we're trying to incentivize, is that if you can do more surgeries in a more efficient way,

00:11:06.800 find a way to restructure your staff, find a way to restructure how you manage your operating rooms,

00:11:13.360 then we want to reward you for it. That's going to make a big difference.

00:11:16.000 Okay, got it. Education. One of the big problems is clearly that there's a lot of people who don't

00:11:23.920 speaking just being pushed into the classrooms and then the door closes and you've got one teacher

00:11:29.840 there and it's very hard to teach correct why don't we stream people well we're having that

00:11:34.560 conversation now um one of the things i'd say about uh what we've learned about the complexity

00:11:40.160 issue is that we have a number of kids who are in the classroom who have very high needs

00:11:46.640 aggression issues or very high medical needs and so we know that there are specialized classrooms

00:11:53.600 in a lot of different school systems where those kids are getting smaller classrooms more one-on-one

00:11:58.240 maybe we need to do more of that but we we when we looked at the data what we discovered is that

00:12:03.200 the number of kids who speak english as a second language has doubled in uh the last three years

00:12:10.720 it is now up to 96 000 students in a school system of of eight of 750 000 kids and so the good news

00:12:19.440 about English language learners is it's one of those things that with the right resources,

00:12:25.520 somebody can become well-spoken in English. So we have to find new ways to make sure that those

00:12:31.000 kids get connected with resources. I can give you an example. We had a large number of Ukrainians

00:12:37.080 who came in the immediate months following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And many of them 0.99

00:12:42.600 found themselves in the school system. I met a couple of young girls, one who'd been here six

00:12:46.820 months, one who'd been here nine months, and they were able to give a presentation about a business

00:12:50.640 idea, a junior achievement, after being here for a very short period of time. But you have to put

00:12:55.100 the dedicated resources in so they can develop that ability in English, so that they can then

00:12:59.740 go on to be integrated into a classroom. So I think what you'll see in the new year, as we've

00:13:04.360 identified that that is the biggest part of the pressure in our classrooms, we will have some

00:13:08.480 dedicated resources for that. Okay, all right, let's talk pipelines for a moment. Yesterday in

00:13:15.320 British Columbia, the court ruled that B.C. legislation has to conform to UNRIP and UNRIP

00:13:22.980 the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Persons. All their legislation has to

00:13:29.780 conform to that. That puts an awful lot of leverage in the hands of Indigenous B.C. leaders. 0.93

00:13:36.980 Just at a time when you have a memorandum of understanding with the Prime Minister about

00:13:41.860 pipelines that even he fell short of saying well if we say it goes it goes you know everybody has

00:13:49.380 to be on side i know you still believe in in the in the pipeline but why there seems to be so much

00:13:56.420 working against it well i can tell you i've been critical of um judges rulings and how it's upended

00:14:03.220 a lot of uh of uh of the uh legislative agenda that we've wanted to do and i've had to use the

00:14:09.380 the notwithstanding clause a few times. I noticed with great interest that Premier David Eby is now

00:14:13.920 saying how outraged he is at the decisions coming down on the court that has upended his private

00:14:19.460 property and land titles legislation, as well as his mineral investment regime. So he is going to,

00:14:25.960 it sounds to me, like do some either modifications to the legislation or challenge that in court.

00:14:31.220 So I think we're all beginning to see that from time to time, judges don't always make

00:14:39.220 a decision that's in sync with the people, and then they're not always right. So I'm going to

00:14:43.140 watch to see how that unfolds. But when it comes to Indigenous resource development, one of the

00:14:49.720 things I would point out in British Columbia is it was actually the Indigenous communities that

00:14:55.840 led the development on LNG. I know we had a hard time getting coastal gasoline built,

00:15:00.380 but in the end, the reason why LNG Canada and Solisms and Wood Fiber and others are being

00:15:07.360 proposed is because there's indigenous proponents to it so we think that that's a good common ground

00:15:12.560 to start from and so my indigenous relations minister has been going to bc quite a lot and

00:15:17.500 having a number of meetings to begin the engagement if we find the right port and i have to tell you

00:15:23.000 i mean i just saw an interview with the prince rupert port authority saying that prince rupert

00:15:28.520 is probably the safest port in canada because it's right on the water deep water very little

00:15:33.920 navigation, straight run to Asia in 8 to 10 days. I think that that is a good starting point. If

00:15:40.540 we're talking about safety and talking about the way in which we can get our products to market

00:15:44.260 on an established port, and we've got to work with the nations in order to have a joint ownership.

00:15:51.540 So you still believe we'll get a pipeline out of all of this?

00:15:54.040 I wouldn't have signed the MOU if I didn't think so. But in the meantime, we also got rid of the

00:16:00.480 emissions cap. We also got rid of the clean electricity regs. Those were the two things

00:16:04.320 I've been advocating against for the past three years. We had national advertising campaigns

00:16:07.980 and it's already demonstrated that it's having an impact on investment decisions. You've got

00:16:12.800 Enbridge, you've got Trans Mountain, you've got South Boat, all talking about new projects to

00:16:18.320 increase the amount of egress for pipelines. You've also got Capital Power talking about how

00:16:24.580 the clean electricity regs are gone. They want to do a major investment in natural gas power

00:16:30.100 generation, which will fuel AI data centers. So those two things alone, I think, are going to

00:16:35.300 make a huge impact in our investment climate. And then just have a little bit more work to do

00:16:39.620 to work out the technical specs for the pathway and route on the pipeline to the BC coast,

00:16:45.620 but I'm confident that we'll be able to. Maybe so, because for some members of your party,

00:16:52.020 that getting a pipeline is a sort of a litmus test on leadership. One last thing before we go.

00:17:00.100 to say to that, though? So if we get 400,000 barrels from Enbridge Mainline, if South Bow

00:17:06.560 does another 650,000 barrel line, if Trans Mountain expands 360,000 barrels, if we get oil

00:17:13.240 by rail to Sydney, Nova Scotia, if we end up with a pipeline going to Churchill so that we're able

00:17:19.800 to export, I would look at all of that as success. And it's going to take a little bit longer to do

00:17:25.080 the BC pipeline but what we needed to do is create an environment where all of those projects would

00:17:31.840 go ahead and that's what I'm hoping that we'll see in the coming months. I notice to end on a

00:17:38.760 frivolous note that the Canadian Taxpayers Federation gave you a big thumbs up. They have

00:17:44.900 a naughty and nice list that they publish every year and apparently the fact that you've used

00:17:50.520 the notwithstanding clause and saved Alberta taxpayers $2 billion puts you on their nice

00:17:58.220 list. I don't think anybody would disagree with that. Now, the thing is to stay on the nice list.

00:18:05.280 So for 2026, a tax break for Alberta taxpayers? Well, we're looking at it. We did our tax break.

00:18:14.820 We accelerated our tax cut this year, so $750 for each individual, $1,500 for a family.

00:18:21.960 But I can tell you, we have a $7.5 billion deficit that we're looking at, because the

00:18:26.700 reality is that our budget needs $74 oil to balance.

00:18:30.380 Oil has been below $60.

00:18:31.720 You can just do the math on that.

00:18:33.280 For every dollar that WTI is short, it's $750 million to our Treasury.

00:18:38.280 So that's a big problem that we've got to deal with.

00:18:40.300 We're starting to deal with it because we're investing the income from the Heritage Fund

00:18:43.840 into the fund so that it can grow to $250 billion

00:18:46.740 to generate a new income source for us.

00:18:49.300 But we have to stick with that plan.

00:18:51.400 And we, quite frankly,

00:18:54.200 we're not going to be able to balance our budget

00:18:56.780 under the current environment.

00:18:58.700 So that's very much top of mind

00:19:00.420 about how we're going to get back into balance.

00:19:03.920 Madam Premier, it's always a pleasure.

00:19:05.720 Thank you for this.

00:19:06.880 And Merry Christmas.

00:19:08.400 Merry Christmas to you.

00:19:09.340 Good to see you.

00:19:10.740 Thank you.

00:19:13.840 Thank you.

Western Standard - December 12, 2025

'No tax-cuts... Alberta must stay disciplined'

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