Article content

How does a government cut essential health services in rural Alberta without anyone seeing their agenda? Simple — they act like OPEC and Russia.

The cuts and fee reductions imposed by Jason Kenney and Tyler Shandro of the United Conservative Party (UCP) have heavily targeted rural medicine and undermined the sustainability of rural practices. Rural obstetrics, emergency departments and “full-scope rural medicine” are no longer financially viable in Alberta.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Opinion: UCP is making rural medicine unsustainable Back to video

The results are that rural physicians are giving notice that they will be leaving after the pandemic and graduating rural physicians are refusing to set up shop in Alberta. The UCP has very efficiently and effectively killed rural medicine.

This decimation was neither accidental nor unintended, and the UCP’s two major reports show exactly how calculated their actions were.

Their first report, the MacKinnon Report, was all about swaying public opinion against doctors by painting physicians as overpaid and inefficient. The report was subsequently shown to have used cherry-picked data and outright erroneous data. The media exposed how the report was anything but “independent” right down to the UCP giving Janice MacKinnon her speaking points when releasing the report.