Allowing physicians to bill patients directly legitimizes a private option for medical care. Combine that with the private surgical facilities and private diagnostic imaging that are now available and indeed encouraged by the Alberta government increases the incentive for physicians to ‘go private’.

We're not talking to the same people. Their base won't pay $20 for a cup of coffee.

So what does two-tier care actually “solve”?

Not the bottleneck. Not wait times overall.

It mostly changes who waits and who can buy their way to the front – while public queues risk getting slower, not faster.

Another claim: “Docs will just do private cases evenings and weekends.”

In a system already facing burnout, short-staffed shifts, and vacant nursing positions, banking on everyone happily adding a second job is… optimistic.

They'll pick one. And it won't be public.

The UCP say: “We’ll fix that with strict ratios. Do X public surgeries before you can do Y private ones.”
In reality that means:

🔴New bureaucracy to track ratios
🔴Gaming the rules
🔴Enforcement nightmares

…while nothing basic changes in OR capacity.

We’ve seen this in the data. In places that allow surgeons to work both public and private lists, wait times in mixed clinics have often been longer than in fully public ones.

Same pool of staff. Different incentives. Slower public care.

So what happens in practice?

Doctors naturally prioritize higher-paying private cases with more flexible scheduling.

Public cases get bumped to the end of the day, the end of the week… then the end of the month.

When you add a private tier, you don’t magically create extra surgeons or nurses.

You just give existing clinicians a more lucrative place to spend their limited time and energy.

Why?

Because the main bottleneck in surgery isn’t the length of the line of patients (any more than the problem with ER times is a lack of bedsl.

It’s the capacity behind the line:
🔴OR time
🔴Nurses
🔴Anesthetists
🔴Techs

All of which are already stretched thin.

The intuitive story goes like this:
Let people pay privately → “rich” patients leave the public line → everyone else moves up faster.

That’s the UCP's “steam valve” argument. Simple, elegant… and mostly wrong.

I mean, if you want to concede ground to every charlatan bent on stealing a brand, that works.

Hitler was a socialist, right?

We are doing some work on subnational affective polarization here in Canada. Commongroundpolitics.ca

More need to. And on more issues than the notwithstanding clause. Judicial and prosecutorial independence, rule of law, and other issues require a more widespread and sustained response.

Didn't say "fringe."