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To paramedics and hospital staff, it’s known as a Code Red — a case where there are no ambulances available to take a call.

David Khan, leader of the Alberta Liberal Party, had heard the stories about the issue — how paramedics in some cases were waiting more than an hour to hand a patient over to ER staff and get back on the road.

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To understand the extent of the problem, the party needed data. So in 2017, the Liberals requested statistics through the province’s freedom of information system on how often Code Reds were occurring.

Khan thought the request was fairly straightforward. But it took the government 18 months to hand over the data, which showed paramedics spent a combined 650,000 hours in 2016 waiting to hand patients over to hospital staff.

“Our role is to hold the government to account,” he said. “We need to have the information to know what’s going wrong so we can propose constructive solutions.