Premier Danielle Smith got a warm welcome from a full house at the Enjoy Centre in St. Albert on Wednesday as the featured speaker for the St. Albert & District Chamber of Commerce.
Her biggest applause of the afternoon came with an account of new surplus capacity in Calgary and Edmonton hospitals.
That made a huge difference on March 28 when a home exploded in a fireball in Calgary, she said.
“Eleven people needed to be transported to hospital, we had 15 ambulances available in Calgary, so every single one of them was able to get admission into hospitals and get the care they needed and they’re all on the road to recovery,” she said to a cheering audience.
After an account of a woman writhing in pain on the floor of Misericordia Hospital, and red alerts for ambulances in rural Alberta, with acute care in hospitals backing up to Emergency rooms, in turn filling up hallways and bottlenecks up to 20 deep in ambualnces.
Her government has taken a backlog of 39,000 patients awaiting surgery for hips, knees, bariatric and cataracts, and brought it down to 32,000 waiting. They will keep reducing the backlog at a rate of 3,000 a month.
“By this time next year, we will have completely eliminated the surgical backlog,” she said.
Wait times have been reduced 10 per cent, an additional 114 new staff have been brought in for onboarding. Paramedics come in, drop their patients, get back out on the road, she said, adding that there have been no red alerts in the last month.
New private surgical centres will be doing knees and hips and shoulders and ankles, creating extra capacity—and creating the opportunity for entrepreneurs to come in and do things a little differently, Smith said.
“What’s so interesting about this proposal is that we don’t have to pay for the facility, they pay for it themselves. We just had to give them the guarantee of a certain number of surgeries and they can go to the bank and be able to finance it,” she said.
The centres are built differently, with 12 operating rooms around the perimeter with a sterilization centre in the middle, she said. The centres will cost $25 million each.
“I keep seeing all these proposals for hospitals, they start off at a billion and a half,” she said, adding she’d like to see if Alberta can use the learning to get more hospitals and better hospitals.
It took a lot of work in the first two years, she said, but Alberta’s budget is balanced.
“We are in surplus, we are paying down debt and we’re shoring up savings,” she said.
At least 50 per cent of any surpluses in the future will be used to pay down debt, she said, so the province can debt freedom in the line of sight.
Smith said her government has made the decision to save all investment income from the Heritage Savings Trust Fund.
“If we had been doing this right from the beginning, we would have had $300 billion in the Heritage Savings Trust Fund now and it would be generating $20 billion in annual income, it would have allowed us to wean ourselves off reliance on resource revenue,” Smith said.
“The alternative is just not acceptable. We can’t get into the habit of overspending and taking on more debt,” she said, adding that spending that income would mean less money for important programs.
As it is, the province pays $3 billion in debt servicing annually, but paying the debt down will free up $500 million a year for investing in programs Albertans value, she said.
Smith said her government would tie increases in operations spending to the previous year’s inflation rate and population growth.
Controlling spending will keep the province from relying on what can be temporarily high resource revenues, which would be unsustainable, she said.
There’s such good news to tell, she told an attentive crowd.
“Alberta has the highest net migration in country, we also have the highest wages if you look at average weekly earnings—that’s continued to grow since 2019.
“The number of businesses that are incorporating in Alberta continues to grow, Budget 2023 projects a record $6.4 billion in business tax revenues and decreased corporate income tax rates.
“More businesses wanted to be here, and now we have the highest level of corporate income tax revenue we’ve ever seen because job creators want to be here,” she said.
According to StatsCanada, Alberta once again led the country in net interprovincial migration growth, Smith said, pointing the Alberta is Calling commercial created for the government.
Smith spoke at the chamber lunch after meeting with St. Albert council members and speaking at the St. Albert Seniors Association on Wednesday.
