Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Jenna Cartusciello examines the connections between COVID-19 and gastrointestinal issues as yet another poorly-studied and potentially long-lasting effect of infection with a disease we’re being told not to worry about. And Omar Mosleh reports on the backsliding in Canadian public health as diseases

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Alberta Politics: Impasse: Ottawa unlikely to fork over billions to make health care better if Conservative premiers insist on using the cash to make it worse

What did Alberta Premier Danielle Smith mean Tuesday in Calgary when she said of her plans for health care that “we’re just going to keep on making … incremental changes; I can’t stop doing reform because the federal government doesn’t want to partner with us”? Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

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Alberta Politics: Premier Jason Kenney, in isolation, blows off criticism of the lackadaisical UCP approach to COVID-19 restrictions as ‘political pressure’

It’s not very reassuring to learn Alberta Premier Jason Kenney treats calls for stricter measures to control resurgent COVID-19 infections as “political pressure.” But yesterday, after Alberta on Wednesday surpassed 400 new cases in a single day for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic began, Mr. Kenney did just

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Alberta Politics: UCP launches ambitious legislative session, with 20 bills packed into six weeks and no time for COVID-19

An ambitious six-week fall sitting of the Alberta Legislature commenced in Edmonton yesterday with Premier Jason Kenney telling the House during Question Period that his government isn’t about to publish any updated COVID-19 modelling. As Opposition Leader Rachel Notley argued, it would be useful to know what the experts say

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Alberta Politics: Coronavirus has U.S. physicians eyeing politics — will COVID-19 and the UCP’s War on Doctors spur the same thing here?

The New York Times reported yesterday how the coronavirus crisis is prodding a wave of mostly progressive American physicians to enter politics. Many are women and most have connected the dots between the United States’ appalling Third World health care system and the disastrous rate of COVID-19 infection and death

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Alberta Politics: UCP’s Friday Morning Massacre purges NDP appointees from Alberta’s boards, agencies and commissions

You almost have to admire Alberta’s United Conservative Party Government for the thoroughness of its sudden purge of NDP appointees to government agencies, boards and commissions yesterday. The Friday Morning Massacre began with news the UCP was clearing out NDP appointments on the boards of 10 post-secondary institutions and the

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Alberta Politics: Lack of information and weak enforcement let private health care clinics fudge public-private health-care line

PHOTO: Parkland Institute researcher Dr. Rebecca Graff-McRae. Below: The cover of the Parkland Institute Report, Blurred Lines, Private Membership Clinics and Public Health Care. It doesn’t exactly come as a surprise that so-called “private membership health care clinics” in Alberta have been fudging the line between public and private health

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Accidental Deliberations: New column day

Here, on the Libs’ pleasantly surprising hints toward enforcing the Canada Health Act – and the Saskatchewan Party’s response that it would rather fight for profit-motivated medicine than work on building a sustainable universal system. For further reading…– By way of background on the enforcement of the Canada Health Act

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