The emergency department at Peter Lougheed hospital in, Calgary in August, 2023.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
Alberta’s government says it plans to increase physician spending by more than 20 per cent in its upcoming budget.
Premier Danielle Smith said Monday her government will spend $7.7-billion on doctors this coming fiscal year, an increase of $1.4-billion.
It’s one of the first major details to come out of a red ink budget expected to include a multibillion-dollar deficit.
The government says most of the physician spending will go directly to pay, with $450-million for recruitment efforts.
“We want to maintain Alberta’s reputation as a fantastic place for doctors to practise, and this funding will ensure the province’s physicians are well-supported and competitively compensated,” Smith said.
She added that with the record-high spending, she expects the number of registered physicians in the province to “keep rising in line with population growth,” but acknowledged that Albertans are “suffering from overburdened health-care services.”
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Primary and Preventative Health Minister Adriana Lagrange said the province has never had so many registered physicians, with 13,000.
“That’s an all-time high,” LaGrange, standing alongside Smith, told reporters.
Sharif Haji, the NDP Opposition critic for primary and preventative health services, said in a statement the funding announcement didn’t provide clarity on how many doctors will be hired or how far the funding will go to ensuring there are enough physicians in Alberta to reduce wait times and increase accessibility.
“The reality is we have fewer doctors per capita in Alberta than we did when the UCP government came to power,” he said.
The Alberta legislature is set to reconvene Tuesday, with the budget to be tabled Thursday.
Smith has already signalled that lower-than-expected oil prices mean the province is in store for “significant” deficits, but has ruled out tax hikes and “deep” service cuts.
As of November, the province was forecasting a $6.4-billion deficit for the current budget year based on a reduced average price of West Texas Intermediate, the North American benchmark oil, at US$61.50 a barrel.
The forecasted average is down from the original US$68 per barrel the province’s current budget is pegged at, with every lost dollar equal to a $750-million dip in Alberta’s treasury.
That “blows about a $12-billion hole into our budget,” Smith said Monday.
“We’re not going to put on rose-coloured glasses and pretend that the numbers aren’t what they are… and pretend that we can balance a budget when we know it would cause devastation to try to cut billions of dollars out of a health budget right now.”
NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi said earlier Monday that while the government brags about a “record-breaking” number of new doctors, the health-care system gets worse and worse.
He noted the number of registered doctors includes people who have left the province but have kept their registration active.
Nenshi said Smith’s massive restructuring of the health-care system has only led to new management organizations, a ballooned bureaucracy, and resources being diverted from the front lines.
“We used to the lowest management ratio in health care in the country. I suspect it’s now close to the highest.”