The Crisis in Alberta ERs Is a Symptom of Bigger Ills

In a backhanded admission that Alberta’s emergency rooms are in a colossal mess, the CEO of one of the government’s confusing tangle of new medical bureaucracies Monday cited “a provincewide response that has seen all sectors of the health-care system co-operate to create capacity and free up resources.”

So what was the point again of Premier Danielle Smith’s expensive project to break Alberta Health Services into itty bitty pieces?

In his press release, Acute Care Alberta CEO David Diamond promised the new bureaucracy he heads “is working with service providers like AHS and Covenant Health to support site-level decisions such as accelerating discharges and transfers where appropriate, limiting non-essential inbound transfers, dedicating 336 beds specifically for respiratory virus season and opening designated surge spaces to manage increased demand.”

Albertans can be forgiven if they are not particularly reassured by this kind of bafflegab.

Diamond’s press release appeared to have been drafted in response to a weekend statement by Alberta Medical Association president Brian Wirzba in support of the pressure being put on the government by frontline physicians in response to the appalling conditions in Alberta’s emergency rooms.

“The first step is restoring system resilience by re-establishing clear accountability for provincial operational integration,” Wirzba said in his statement. “This includes confirming provincial health agency accountability for patient flow and surge capacity within and between care-delivery corridors and across service providers.”

In other words, pretty much what we had before the UCP started to bust up Alberta Health Services because our anti-vax premier blamed it for public health measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Loss of this capability has significantly contributed to today’s crisis,” said the leader of the physicians’ collective bargaining and advocacy association, in what surely is the first major understatement of 2026.

Evidence of the crisis, Wirzba said, includes the fact Alberta hospitals have run at 110 per cent capacity for more than a year and the number of patients walking out of emergency rooms without being seen is up 77 per cent since 2019, the year the UCP came to power.

Diamond’s release suggested that the current chaos in Alberta’s emergency rooms, where patients have been known to wait up to 72 hours to see a doctor in recent days, was just a result of “a particularly challenging respiratory virus season, which has placed considerable pressure on our emergency departments.”

This is essentially the same excuse trotted out by the press secretary to Primary and Preventative Health Services Minister Adriana LaGrange, the most senior of Alberta’s Gang of Four health ministers, although more diplomatically worded.

“Albertans can be assured that the government of Alberta, provincial health agencies and service delivery organizations are working together to actively support the acute care system and meet the daily pressures and high demand,” Diamond added, not really very reassuringly.

Diamond noted that Recovery Alberta, another of the UCP’s welter of easy-to-privatize health agencies, “has made six beds available for additional surge capacity, with an additional six more to come.” Is it just me, or does this sound unlikely to do much to help meet the crisis in ERs, so crowded everywhere in Alberta by literally thousands of patients that they have just about collapsed. Oh well, every little bit helps, one supposes.

Diamond claimed in his news release that respiratory virus hospital admissions peaked on Dec. 28, a claim that had an echo in the news conference Monday by Alberta’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. Vivien Suttorp, who was somewhat less definitive in the implication the winter wave of respiratory infections has passed.

Suttorp noted in her newser that Alberta’s immunization rate for influenza is only 19 per cent, and that 74 per cent of the more than 500 people still hospitalized for the disease were not vaccinated. Presumably that can be chalked up to the success of the UCP’s vaccination suppression strategy. On New Year’s Eve, more than 700 Albertans were in hospital with the flu.

Meanwhile, there are 118 patients in hospital with COVID (Alberta vaccination cost, $100 per shot), Suttorp said, plus another 85 with RSV, as respiratory syncytial virus is commonly known.

Presumably we’ll be hearing from Diamond again today, when Acute Care Alberta is expected to have a news conference. Maybe someone will explain why Edmonton’s ongoing ER crisis has nothing to do with the fact a new hospital hasn’t been built in the city since 1988, when the population was 576,249.

The Alberta capital city’s population is now estimated to be 1.24 million and that of the metropolitan area to be 1.6 million.

With the exception of the period from 2015 to 2019, the province has been governed by Conservatives. Premier Rachel Notley’s NDP government announced in 2017 that a new hospital would be built in south Edmonton, but the UCP soon pulled the plug on that project.