I'd be far more sympathetic to the random, niche policy interests of the provincial government if they made any improvement on the major portfolios in their now 6 years in office. The biggest ones for me are health care, public education, car and home insurance and day care costs. IMO, any provincial government should be focusing 75 - 90% of it's time on these:
- Health care - yikes. It's a tough portfolio, but it's been 6 years. Has anything they done made any measurable improvement so far?
- Public education - the spent their first 3 years getting distracted with virtue signaling and curriculum battles, instead of building and funding schools. They slept on the school capacity time-bomb, then blamed the teachers union for classroom size issues and shoveled money too late into the game. Just a poorly run approach that's waaay to obvious in it's ideologically-driven objectives here.
- Car and home insurance costs - I mean, what's there to say here? lol is anyone happy with their premiums? Has any province ever handled this worse?
- Day care costs - this one is under the radar right now but only AB and Sask have no extension in place beyond March 2026 to keep day care affordable. Lots of people are going to get surprised with $1,000+ month increases in fees in 4 months. The province has slow-played and delayed all along just to get the first deal signed - all for reasons that were never clear, and aren't an issue for all the other provinces that signed on happily and quickly because it's an overwhelmingly popular policy.
There's other stuff out there, but I find it remarkable how poorly and controversially they have handled some of these big portfolios. Do they really think they have and should pick unpopular battle on every issue?
Other governments with niche interests keep a steady hand on the big stuff so they get latitude to do their weird niche stuff they know are not popular or not interesting to people (e.g. fun tax-payer funded trips to podcasters/hockey games etc., offer sole-source Tylenol contracts to buddies, push through unpopular coal mine policies then screw up and payout hundreds of millions to coal companies, have dozens of political buddies tour around the province on panels to stoke up separatism with loaded-question surveys, conspiracies and lies etc.)
It's the doing stuff they know is not popular, but for little obvious objective other than to rile up the base or cater to a hyper-specific partisan niche perspective that has worn me down over time. Being generous here, but it comes across as arrogant and not really interested in doing any of the governing, just the politicking part of their jobs.
Combines some of the arrogance critiques of the late PC-era, with the ideological-driven incompetence of the modern day populist agendas into one exhausting package.
As someone that is more conservative leaning but more in the PC lane, I think some of these areas have had a lot of work being put into them than what you see on the news.
1. Healthcare. They're spending a lot of money on changing the system, whether that works or not, we don't know yet. But a good counterfactual of an NDP province would be BC, and Albertans have higher, but relatively similar access to primary physicians, wait time across common procedures are largely the same (small variation depending on the procedure).
BC does have more doctors per capital than AB with AB at 117 Family Physicians, and 123 Specialist per 100,000 and BC at 138 Family physician and 134 specialist per 100,000. But for all the talk about how terrible it is to work in healthcare in this province, the net migration in 2024 between Canadian jurisdictions, AB gained 76 doctors while BC lost 34 doctors (
https://www.cihi.ca/en/physicians)
And in most of these healthcare performance dashboards published by CIHI, AB performance is largely above average/improving and it isn't some calamity where everything is going downhill.
https://www.cihi.ca/en/dashboards/overall-health-system-performance
Percentage of Canadians who report having access to a regular health provider
www.cihi.ca
Use the visualizations to explore wait times for priority procedures, including hip and knee replacement, hip fracture repair, cataract surgery and more.
www.cihi.ca
2. Public Education
I agree the government moved too slow, did not plan ahead for the large influx of population. But while interprovincial was part of their doing (AB is calling), the vast majority is international, which they have limited control over. It wasn't long ago that we were closing schools in the late 2010s, so I can see why the government would be hesitant to invest in schools before the demand materialized. I do not agree with the use of the NWC on the negotiations. They could've mandated back to work legislation while continuing to negotiate, which should've been the correct path.
3. Insurance
For insurance in general, there is no place where you find large profits. Insurers are leaving the province because it is not profitable. So insurance rates can't come down without a meaningful change in claims, coverage or payouts.
For home insurance, AB has some of the largest insurance cost events in the country. The hailstorm was one of the largest insurance event in the last decade, and before that was the floods. I don't think there is a way to reduce cost without loss of coverage, because insurance companies are operating at near 100% or higher payout ratios.
For car insurance, a lot of people point to BC, but cost is lower because the claims are set and there's no legal recourse for damages. There probably is middle ground here, but part of having insurance is that when things happen, you want to have the ability to sue for damages rather than deal with an administrative process that many feel is unfair. The cost is higher because it's a different model, and there's advantages to this model as well. The government is in consultations to change up the insurance model so it balances cost and compensation.
Victoria Ward said the accident has prevented her from teaching fitness classes and re-opening her daycare after being forced to close it while she was battling breast cancer.
globalnews.ca
4. Childcare
I can't really speak to this one as I'm not a user of the system and don't follow it particularly closely. I do think this government likes to not take handouts from the Feds and is always trying to opt out of things or get the funding instead of the program, which is a bit tiring. So I agree on that front.
