Alberta Minute: Issue 376

Alberta Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Alberta politics.

📅 This Week In Alberta: 📅

• Albertans can now pay out of pocket for MRIs, CT scans, ultrasounds and X-rays without a doctor's referral, under a new self-referral system that took effect last Friday. Patients pay before receiving the test, either directly or through private insurance, and results go straight to the patient and into their electronic health record. If a test leads to a new cancer diagnosis, the patient can claim reimbursement at publicly funded rates for up to a year from the date of diagnosis. Primary and Preventative Health Services Minister Justin Wright says participating private clinics must maintain the same access to physician-referred, publicly funded services they provided before the change. The provincial government says Alberta is the first province to let patients self-refer, pay, and be reimbursed this way, while Alberta Medical Association President Dr. Brian Wirzba warns the change could add to public-system backlogs through false positives and incidental findings. The president of Canada Diagnostic Centres estimates private diagnostic testing could quadruple to 50,000 or 60,000 tests a year, still a small share of the 7 million exams the system handles annually. 
  
  
• Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Danielle Smith announced a new Canada-Alberta housing infrastructure agreement in Red Deer last Wednesday. The deal lets Alberta municipalities access more than $510 million in federal funding over eight years through the Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund for water and wastewater projects that enable new housing, with the Province contributing at least one third of eligible project costs. Carney claims the agreement will support 750 skilled trades jobs every year. [Editor's Note: Why can't Albertans just pay less to Ottawa in the first place, rather than sending extra money to the federal government and then having to negotiate to get some of it back?]
  
  
• Speaking at the same Red Deer announcement, Premier Danielle Smith also pitched changes to Canada's equalization program. Smith says the provincial government's calculations show "have-not" provinces have been overcompensated by $7 billion over the last 5 years, and she wants the escalator that grows the program with the size of the economy removed, with the excess distributed back to provinces on an equal per capita basis. The current formula is largely based on recommendations from a 2006 report, and the federal and provincial governments are due to consult on renewing equalization before March 31st, 2029. Carney said Canadians across the country should have reasonably comparable services and resources, but acknowledged that how provincial resources are calculated will be looked at as the review approaches. University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe notes the formula can discourage receiving provinces from maximizing their own resource revenues, since higher revenues mean lower equalization payments, and suggests any review should also look at other federal transfers such as health funding. While reform of the formula would be an improvement over the status quo, it's a far cry from the complete abolition of the program that 62% of Albertans voted in favour of in 2021.
  
  
• Musician Corb Lund's Water Not Coal campaign has filed for judicial review of Elections Alberta's decision to reject its petition calling for a ban on new coal mining in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains. The petition was submitted last month with more than 196,000 signatures, above the 177,732 required for a citizen initiative, but Elections Alberta's random statistical sampling verified only 172,088. The application, filed in the Court of King's Bench last Wednesday, argues the rejection was unreasonable and procedurally unfair, with Lund saying signatures were disqualified over mismatched middle names and addresses and that verification agents did not prompt electors for missing details. Lund wants a judge to either declare the petition successful or send it back to Elections Alberta. The group is not alone in raising concerns, as organizers of the pro-separation Stay Free Alberta petition, which passed verification earlier in July, are asking for a legislative review of the same process. Elections Alberta says its sampling method is set out in the Citizens Initiative Act and uses the same formula as other North American jurisdictions with similar petition processes.
  
  
• The Alberta NDP continues its campaign against new AI data centres this week, announcing additional consultation events in St. Albert and Red Deer to gather feedback on proposed projects. The party says its primary concerns are the potential impacts on electricity demand, water use, and noise in nearby communities. The provincial government says these concerns are unfounded, as any data centre built in Alberta are required to provide their own electricity generation, use closed-loop cooling systems that minimize water consumption, and be built in existing industrial areas away from residential neighbourhoods. The NDP's campaign mirrors many of the arguments used in past anti-development campaigns against Alberta's oil and gas industry, while also reflecting the messaging of far-left environmental activist groups in the United States that have also organized against new data centres on environmental grounds. Supporters of the projects argue that Alberta's competitive electricity market, industrial land base, and abundant natural gas make the province an attractive destination for billions of dollars in private investment, jobs, and tax revenue.

🚨 This Week’s Action Item: 🚨

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