You have to wonder if Liberal Leader David Swann and Premier Ed Stelmach are having regrets about their decisions to retire this year — Swann because he’s leaving too early and Stelmach because he’s leaving too late.
For Swann, things are coming together; for Stelmach, things seem to be falling apart.
And it’s all because of two issues dear to Swann: problems in health care and allegations of government intimidation.
It was Swann’s first-hand experience with government intimidation that propelled him into politics after he was fired as medical officer of health of the Palliser Health Authority in southern Alberta in 2002. Swann’s crime? Speaking up for the Kyoto accord to reduce greenhouse gases.
If intimidation ignited his political career, it was his experience as a physician in the health-care system that provided the fuel — and convinced Liberal members that having a physician as leader would boost the party’s credibility with the public.
It didn’t work out that way. Swann never really clicked with the public, according to opinion polls. He faced dissent within his own caucus and was largely overlooked by the media — leading him to throw in the towel and announce he’s stepping down as leader after the spring sitting, just days after Stelmach announced his retirement (that won’t actually take place until September).
But Swann must be feeling like an investor who has sold all of his stocks right before the market bounces back.
Suddenly, the government is under relentless attack over problems in the health-care system. Doctors are coming forward with tales of intimidation after they advocated for better patient care. The opposition parties held a joint news conference last week — with Swann as lead speaker — to call for a public inquiry into intimidation and untimely deaths in the health-care system.
To top it off, the Alberta Medical Association bolstered Swann’s position by using the I-word — intimidate — in a letter to members about the current round of contract talks with doctors: “For the first time ever, government threatened the loss of programs and services to try and intimidate physicians,” said AMA president Patrick White, deliberately choosing to use the most loaded word in Alberta politics.
Given that doctors were in contract negotiations when White wrote the letter, there’s a hint of gamesmanship here. But there’s also more than a whiff of genuine anger at the government.
A few days later, White called for “an open and full review” of complaints about intimidation of doctors who stand up for patients in the face of administrative and political punishment.
One saving grace for the government was that White used the word “review” and not “inquiry.”
This has become the big debating point in Alberta politics — one that keeps reporters and politicians awake at night and one that puts everyone else to sleep.
The government has ordered the arm’s-length Health Quality Council of Alberta to conduct a review. It will be closed door and will look into complaints of 321 examples of “compromised care” in 2008 and it will determine whether the quality of care for 250 cancer patients was compromised from 2003 to 2006. It will not, according to the terms of reference announced this week, look into Independent MLA Raj Sherman’s more explosive allegation of a double set of accounting books set up to hide hush money paid to doctors over the untimely deaths of patients on waiting lists for surgery.
On the other hand, a judicial inquiry, as demanded by the opposition parties, would be public — with the power to compel witnesses to testify — and would presumably be able to look into everything.
It is the difference between a forensic audit and a public trial.
Importantly, the goal of the health council’s review is “not to lay blame on any one individual or organization, but to look at system-wide issues and opportunities for improvement.”
The opposition parties, on the other hand, want to lay blame. They want a great big finger wagging at the government. They no doubt want to improve the system, but they also want to embarrass Conservatives, whether that’s the minister of health today or the minister of health from 2003 — namely, Gary Mar, who’s now running for the Conservative leadership.
They know they’d have a much better chance of doing that with a public inquiry than a closed-door review.
What we should keep in mind here is that complaints of intimidation are not new. Doctors were complaining about bullying and muzzling 15 years ago. Dr. Anne Fanning, for example, who has been in the news recently talking about government intimidation, was a cause celebre in 1997 after being dismissed as the head of Alberta’s tuberculosis control program.
“I was opposed to health-care cuts,” Fanning told reporters at the time. “That is why I’ve lost my job.”
So, today’s angst can be traced back to the health care cuts made by Stelmach’s predecessor, Ralph Klein.
It is one of the Klein skeletons that has come back to haunt the Conservatives.
A closed-door review will help rebury the body — or at least keep it in a shallow grave until after Stelmach is safely retired in September.
But the opposition will be doing its best to reanimate the corpse to plague the new Conservative leader in time for the next election.
Read more: http://www.edmontonjournal.com/Health+care+angst+Klein+skeleton+Tories/4467610/story.html#ixzz1H1YFMoDN
