Alberta Premier Danielle Smith defends health portfolio split

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said Saturday that splitting up the health portfolio amid her cabinet shuffle was the right call for her government.

Her comments are on the heels of a shuffle of her cabinet, adding two new ministers and moving former Health Minister Adriana LaGrange to the new ministry of primary and preventative health services.

“This was the direction right from the beginning when I first came in,” Smith said. “One of the things I considered was creating a separate minister for Alberta Health Services (AHS).”

Smith added three ministries and renamed several others, including Jason Nixon, now heading the assisted living and social services portfolio, which previously had seniors in the title.

The last week of the spring session also saw former Municipal Affairs Minister Ric McIver become Speaker of the assembly–replacing Nathan Cooper, now Alberta’s U.S. representative.

While on the bi-weekly radio show Your Province, Your Premier, Smith said creating a separate ministry for AHS was always under consideration. She added AHS was doing everything but not “particularly well.”

Smith claimed emergency rooms have become a one-stop shop for everything from long-term care to mental health and addictions, stretching them too thin, when asked by host Wayne Nelson about the health portfolio potentially being siloed off.

“So we’ve actually turned our hospitals into multi-purpose facilities and taken them away from their core job, which is to deal with emergencies and to efficiently make sure that people can get surgery and also do the convalescence there,” she said.

“We’ve tried it that way, all integrated. I think we need to try it a different way, because it clearly wasn’t working. It wasn’t creating the kind of environment that our nurses wanted to work in, and we’re working very hard to not only give a much improved patient experience, but to also have all of our frontline staff feel excited to get up for work in the morning.”

Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi said Friday the cabinet shuffle represents a “massive” demotion for LaGrange, who was once in charge of the entire health-care system.

Nenshi, who has repeatedly called for LaGrange to resign, pointed out she is no longer in charge of doling out private surgical contracts or managing the acute care system.

“She can’t screw up hospitals more than she already has. I guess that’s an improvement,” he said.

Smith laughed at the notion of the minister being demoted, praising LaGrange and saying, “She’s got the best bulk of the decision-making now ahead of her.”

Smith began restructuring the healthcare system since she took office in 2022, and much of the focus has been on primary care, which is the first point of contact with the health system and includes family doctors, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and public health nurses.

“I mean, when you think about it, how many times do you go into a hospital as a patient? It’s actually a very small number of people who have to have a hospital visit experience, but all of us need to go to a primary care practitioner probably once a year, if you’re getting your checkups on an annual basis, but often four or five or six times a year. And that’s where we’ve got a lot of frustration, is there are too many people not attached to a family doctor,” Smith explained.

“Although we’re making improvements there, we can do more.”

LaGrange headed the restructuring as health minister, announcing the split of AHS’s responsibilities into four new health agencies that are now in place: Primary Care for dealing with family doctors, Acute Care for hospitals, Assisted Living Alberta, and Recovery Alberta for managing mental health and addictions.

However, she has been under a critical public eye since allegations from former AHS CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos claim high-level arm-twisting and conflicts of interest surrounding multimillion-dollar deals for health products and surgical procedures.

People named in the allegations include Smith, LaGrange, and interim AHS president and CEO Andre Tremblay.

LaGrange, in a statement of defence, says Mentzelopoulos was not fired from her job for investigating corruption, but because she was failing to do her job and was working to stop mandated health reform.

Former chief of staff Marshall Smith, whom Mentzelopoulos alleges pressured her to sign off on contracts for private surgical facilities, is suing her for defamation.

Since Smith became premier in 2022, several changes and plans have been made to the province’s healthcare system, something she once said could be done in 90 days.

Those include firing two AHS boards, axing two AHS CEOs, and creating four new health agencies to replace AHS. It also includes introducing an activity-based funding model for surgeries, which would tie public funding to the number and type of procedures performed, along with a plan to “Uber-ize” the province’s online continuing care directory.

Additionally, staffing continues to be an issue, with over 400 staff transferred to Acute Care, including teams involved in patient safety and surgical care. A report from Great West Media states that 25 ERs were closed for more than 34,400 hours in 2024, equivalent to the province losing four ERs entirely.

In a February poll by Abacus Data on Health Sciences Association of Alberta (HSAA) members, 89 per cent say the province’s healthcare system is in crisis, and 64 per cent say government policy failures are making the crisis worse.

With files from The Canadian Press