Things are beginning to line up in terms of the UCP's plan and we can see now how they are going to attack health care and Albertans. There's quite a sequence of things here, but the picture they paint when you draw it all out is quite interesting - and not in a good way interesting.
A Brief Chronology
May 2023 - Premier Smith promises "mandatory drug treatment" as part of the UCP's proposed addictions policy
November 2023 - Dismantling of AHS Becomes Public
January 2024 - Premier Smith unveils a package of policies and legislation regarding transgender youth in Alberta.
March 2024 - UCP Announces Regulating Counselling Therapists under The College of Alberta Psychologists
July 2024 - Smith promises a revised Alberta Human Rights legislation
August 2024 - The Alberta Recovery Training Institute is unveiled
August 2024 - Smith reveals plans to divest of hospitals and hand them over to groups like Covenant Health
There's more, oh, so much more. But that's enough for the picture I want to explore here.
The Forked Tongue
While any one of the above items reveals plenty of questionable, if not downright bad policy, it's the bigger picture that counts here.
Regulating Counselling Therapists
Now, this you might look at and say "well, that's a good thing, right?", and you would be correct. Except that the way it was done upended a process that had been ongoing since 2018. Further, the UCP simply foisted it upon the parties involved - neither the College of Alberta Psychologists (CAP) nor the Association of Counselling Therapists of Alberta (ACTA) were consulted - the decision was simply made. If that doesn't freak you out, it damn well should.
However, this gives the government a pretext under which to open up the Health Professions Act. This is the act which grants authority for regulatory colleges in Alberta to operate and sets out the scope of their authority. The last time the UCP proposed changing the act, it was in 2019 when a newly elected MLA, Dan Williams proposed Bill 207 which would have made "conscience rights" a central feature of the legislation. As I pointed out back then, this was a back door attack on a bunch of Social Conservative hobby horses - ranging from abortion to 2SLGBTQ healthcare. How much do you want to bet that Minister of Addictions and Mental Health Dan Williams will slide the content of Bill 207 into whatever he tables this fall?
The second part of this is more troubling. The scope of ACTA would have included counselling therapists, addictions therapists, and child therapists. When the announcement was made in March 2024, addictions therapists and child therapists were left out with no explanation. At the time, I suspected strongly that this had a lot to do with the government's planned "recovery focused" approach to addictions.
Addictions Treatment
A central theme here is the government's decision to go authoritarian on addictions treatment. On numerous occasions the UCP has made it clear that they are going to use the Notwithstanding Clause (S.33) of the Charter to insulate their involuntary treatment plans from court scrutiny.
I haven't had a chance to examine what the program of the Alberta Recovery Training Institute looks like, but the forced treatment aspect of the proposed programme violates fundamental principles of mental health ethics - in particular concepts like individual autonomy. The ethical principles most counselling therapists abide by centre treatment on the needs of the client. Forced treatment places the counsellor into a place where they are in an ethical bind.
This implies that the government may move to regulate Addictions Counselling under a very different rubric than that which applies to other mental health disciplines. This is potentially very problematic for a number of reasons, including creating a silo that isolates Addictions Counsellors from other aspects of the mental health world, and vice versa in spite of the many places that both overlap.
The second aspect of this whole mess that I find concerning is the degree of questionable privatization connected to a group of people with deep connections to the former BC Liberal government. The "My Recovery Plan" app is controlled by a BC organization and that creates some very troubling issues with the ethics around data and privacy.
One aspect of this I find troubling is that the data needed to assess whether the government's treatment approach is working is in fact not readily available to make measurements on. I suspect that this also conflicts with existing health information and privacy legislation in ways not yet disclosed.
Transgender Treatment
Although Smith's announcement in January was focused on transgender youth, the issues here are a broader attack on individual autonomy. The government is effectively banning treatment for transgender youth, and is stripping not only the youth, but their parents, of the authority to make decisions regarding their own treatment.
As I discussed yesterday, this is a blatant attack on rights and places Alberta on a very slippery slope towards the erosion and revocation of rights on many other fronts. The UCP could attempt to buttress this with a resurrection of the "conscience rights" legislation gambit from 2019.
The Social Conservative Agenda
However, along with Addictions, this is part of a broader Social Conservative (SoCon) agenda. Remember, SoCons aren't just angry about trans people or seeing addicts - they have a whole bundle of issues that they want to outlaw - ranging from abortion and IVF to banning gay marriage and getting rid of "no fault divorce".
Which is where yesterday's announcement about turning hospitals over to outfits like Covenant Health. Covenant Health has long held to a religious perspective on matters of healthcare like abortion and more recently Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).
Think about this for a moment: add in some legislation in the Alberta Health Care sphere that allows for "conscience" matters to exist organizationally, and suddenly the Alberta Government can effectively ban any healthcare procedure it finds distasteful simply by turning it over to a group like Covenant Health and letting them "control" it (which will turn into an effective ban because Covenant Health will simply point to the edicts of the Roman Catholic Bishops and tell the rest of us to fuck off).
Worried yet?
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