Braid: A week when UCP policies, COVID plans collapsed under pressure

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This was the week the UCP fled from major policies on nurses’ pay and teacher pensions.

It also brought the failure of government COVID-19 policy based on protecting the health system.

A very bad week; surely the worst in a long line for a troubled government.

“They’ve had to retreat from their battle lines,” says David Taras, Mount Royal University political analyst.

“The wars that they were fighting, all of a sudden they realize they can’t win them and they retreat — with the nurses, the teachers and COVID, which is a shambles.”

Since early 2020, the plan for handling COVID-19 has been to protect the health-care system from being overwhelmed by infected people.

If that could be done, the rest of the system could cope with regular hospitalizations and surgeries, especially after vaccinations took hold.

Those fixed assumptions all went to hell this week.

The policy — and the health system itself — began to buckle under staff and space shortages as the fourth wave surged.

All elective surgeries were cancelled for the week in Calgary, along with many others around the province.

An Edmonton-area man named Eric Mulder had his brain surgery postponed indefinitely 24 hours before it was scheduled.

He posted a horrifying image of his tumour on Twitter. It instantly became a symbol of everything the government tried, and failed, to prevent.

There were periods when no ambulances were available in Calgary or Edmonton. ICU wards were nearly full even after “surge capacity” was added.

On Thursday, at a news conference where the decision-makers seemed frazzled and uncertain, plans were announced to send 400 patients from hospital beds to long-term care.

This is an ancient problem that should have been solved years ago. Now the UCP will try to fix it with $36 million to increase worker pay and staffing, a move that can’t possibly have any effect for weeks or months.

The fundamental blunder came in summer, when the government, fed up with the pandemic, declared it to be over and done with.

Premier Jason Kenney started calling it the “flu” again. His issues manager, Matt Wolf, infamously tweeted at critics: “The pandemic is ending. Accept it.”

Many Albertans wanted to believe it, although dozens of experts disagreed, warning that a fourth wave could be aggressive and dangerous.

But Dr. Deena Hinshaw, chief medical officer of health, concluded that hospitalizations would “decouple” from infections because of the vaccine.

That was a terrible blunder for which she took responsibility Thursday.

AHS, after insisting that staff shortages and bed closures were regular seasonal events, has finally acknowledged a crisis.

Worst of all, in August the political leaders and Hinshaw virtually vanished from sight and hearing. Albertans had no official warning of the impending crisis.

The full blame belongs to a government that imposes measures too late, lifts them too soon and has a congenital problem with vacations.

The most absurd statement of the week came from Health Minister Tyler Shandro.

“No jurisdiction has been able to predict the future,” he said.

His government did predict, and was dead wrong, while others were predicting exactly what happened.

Nurses, doctors and other medical workers are now scrambling to keep the system viable.

The UCP finally seems to realize that a desperate nurse shortage is looming.

Last week, government negotiators informed the nurses’ union that it was dropping the demand for a three per cent pay cut — a major retreat from a year of implacable policy.

It comes as AHS is forced to hire private “agency nurses” (at higher pay than AHS nurses) to keep wards functioning.

The UCP also reversed its order giving AIMCo power to make investment decisions for the Alberta Teachers’ Retirement Fund.

AIMCo will still host the money, but the teachers will set investment strategy — a wise move, since their fund has a better 10-year record than AIMCo.

Tense talks also continue with the Alberta Medical Association, after doctors rejected a tentative master agreement in March.

There’s little doubt that with many doctors thinking of leaving, retiring or changing their practices, they now have the upper hand.

Overall, Taras considers the situation “such a disaster, such a collapse, that you wonder how the government itself doesn’t collapse.”

Twitter: @DonBraid

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