Alberta
Alberta passes bill banning sex ‘reassignment’ surgeries on minors
From LifeSiteNews
Tuesday, MLAs in the Alberta legislature voted 47 to 33 to pass the Health Statutes Amendment Act (HSAA), with all New Democratic Party MLAs voting against the measure.
The United Conservative Party (UCP) government of Alberta under its Premier Danielle Smith has officially passed a law banning so-called “top and bottom” surgeries for minors.
On Tuesday, MLAs in the Alberta legislature voted 47 to 33 to pass the Health Statutes Amendment Act (HSAA) into law. All far-left New Democratic Party MLAs voted against the bill, which now awaits Royal Assent which is expected in the next few days.
The new law, called Bill 26, reflects “the government’s commitment to build a health care system that responds to the changing needs of Albertans,” it said.
The bill will amend the Health Act to “prohibit regulated health professionals from performing sex reassignment surgeries on minors.”
It will also ban the “use of puberty blockers and hormone therapies for the treatment of gender dysphoria or gender incongruence” to kids 15 and under “except for those who have already commenced treatment and would allow for minors aged 16 and 17 to choose to commence puberty blockers and hormone therapies for gender reassignment and affirmation purposes with parental, physician and psychologist approval.”
Speaking of the passage of the new law, Smith said she is not concerned she may have to use additional powers, such as the province’s notwithstanding clause, to make sure the bill stays in place, given the fact that left-wing LGBT activists have promised to challenge the bill in court.
“I think that both the Charter as well as our Bill of Rights has the ability to make decisions and make policy that is convenient, that is reasonable, that is evidence-based,” said Smith in speaking to the passage of the bill.
“And I think the decisions we made are all of those things.”
Smith had earlier said about the bill that it is “important that all youth can enter adulthood equipped to make adult decisions. In order to do that, we need to preserve their ability to make those decisions, and that’s what we’re doing.”
She also, as reported by LifeSiteNews, said she would not be “bullied out of preserving our children’s choices before they make life-altering — and often irreversible — adult decisions. Nor will I allow Justin Trudeau to limit parental involvement in their child’s education.”
The passage of Bill 26 came after Alberta’s pro-life Health Minister Adriana LaGrange moved the third reading of it. She praised its passage, saying further details about how it will be enforced will be coming soon.
“Finally, amendments to the Health Professions Act would prohibit regulated health professionals from performing sex reassignment surgeries on minors and would also prohibit regulated health professionals from prescribing hormone replacement therapies, including puberty blockers, to minors for the treatment of gender dysphoria or gender incongruence,” said LaGrange.
“Through a ministerial order, we will outline exceptions for when a minor can be prescribed these medications for the treatment of gender dysphoria or gender incongruence.”
Earlier this year, the UCP government under Smith announced she would introduce strong pro-family legislation that strengthens parental rights, protects kids from life-altering surgeries as well as other extreme forms of transgender ideology.
While Smith has done well on some points, she has still been relatively soft on social issues of importance to conservatives such as abortion, and has publicly expressed pro-LGBT views, telling Jordan Peterson earlier this year that conservatives must embrace homosexual “couples” as “nuclear families.”
Alberta law banning sex reassignment surgeries has support of ‘detransitioners’
Smith’s bill banning the sexual mutilation of minors, as reported by LifeSiteNews, has found the support of an alliance for detransitioners.
There has been overwhelming evidence showing that people who undergo so-called “gender transitioning” are more likely to commit suicide than those who are not given irreversible surgery.
In addition to catering to a false reality that one’s sex can be changed, transgender surgeries and drugs have been linked to permanent physical and psychological damage, including cardiovascular diseases, loss of bone density, cancer, strokes and blood clots, and infertility.
Meanwhile, a recent study on the side effects of transgender “sex change” surgeries discovered that 81 percent of those who had undergone “sex change” surgeries in the past five years reported experiencing pain simply from normal movement in the weeks and months that followed — and that many other side effects manifest as well.
Smith’s government also passed a law banning schools from hiding a child’s pronoun changes at school that will help protect kids from the extreme aspects of the LGBT agenda.
While social conservatives have cause to celebrate in Alberta, other provinces, such as New Brunswick, are heading in the opposite direction when it comes to parental rights and gender ideology more broadly.
Alberta’s government is introducing a new acute care funding model, increasing the accountability, efficiency and volume of high-quality surgical delivery.
Currently, the health care system is primarily funded by a single grant made to Alberta Health Services to deliver health care across the province. This grant has grown by $3.4 billion since 2018-19, and although Alberta performed about 20,000 more surgeries this past year than at that time, this is not good enough. Albertans deserve surgical wait times that don’t just marginally improve but meet the medically recommended wait times for every single patient.
With Acute Care Alberta now fully operational, Alberta’s government is implementing reforms to acute care funding through a patient-focused funding (PFF) model, also known as activity-based funding, which pays hospitals based on the services they provide.
“The current global budgeting model has no incentives to increase volume, no accountability and no cost predictability for taxpayers. By switching to an activity-based funding model, our health care system will have built-in incentives to increase volume with high quality, cost predictability for taxpayers and accountability for all providers. This approach will increase transparency, lower wait times and attract more surgeons – helping deliver better health care for all Albertans, when and where they need it.”
Activity-based funding is based on the number and type of patients treated and the complexity of their care, incentivizing efficiency and ensuring that funding is tied to the actual care provided to patients. This funding model improves transparency, ensuring care is delivered at the right time and place as multiple organizations begin providing health services across the province.
“Exploring innovative ways to allocate funding within our health care system will ensure that Albertans receive the care they need, when they need it most. I am excited to see how this new approach will enhance the delivery of health care in Alberta.”
Patient-focused, or activity-based, funding has been successfully implemented in Australia and many European nations, including Sweden and Norway, to address wait times and access to health care services, and is currently used in both British Columbia and Ontario in various ways.
“It is clear that we need a new approach to manage the costs of delivering health care while ensuring Albertans receive the care they expect and deserve. Patient-focused funding will bring greater accountability to how health care dollars are being spent while also providing an incentive for quality care.”
This transition is part of Acute Care Alberta’s mandate to oversee and arrange for the delivery of acute care services such as surgeries, a role that was historically performed by AHS. With Alberta’s government funding more surgeries than ever, setting a record with 304,595 surgeries completed in 2023-24 and with 310,000 surgeries expected to have been completed in 2024-25, it is crucial that funding models evolve to keep pace with the growing demand and complexity of services.
“With AHS transitioning to a hospital-based services provider, it’s time we are bold and begin to explore how to make our health care system more efficient and manage the cost of care on a per patient basis. The transition to a PFF model will align funding with patient care needs, based on actual service demand and patient needs, reflecting the communities they serve.”
“Covenant Health welcomes a patient-focused approach to acute care funding that drives efficiency, accountability and performance while delivering the highest quality of care and services for all Albertans. As a trusted acute care provider, this model better aligns funding with outcomes and supports our unwavering commitment to patients.”
“Patient-focused hospital financing ties funding to activity. Hospitals are paid for the services they deliver. Efficiency may improve and surgical wait times may decrease. Further, hospital managers may be more accountable towards hospital spending patterns. These features ensure that patients receive quality care of the highest value.”
Leadership at Alberta Health and Acute Care Alberta will review relevant research and the experience of other jurisdictions, engage stakeholders and define and customize patient-focused funding in the Alberta context. This working group will also identify and run a pilot to determine where and how this approach can best be applied and implemented this fiscal year.
Final recommendations will be provided to the minister of health later this year, with implementation of patient-focused funding for select procedures across the system in 2026.
David Clinton
Contrasting the principle of equalization with the execution
Quebec – as an example – happens to be sitting on its own significant untapped oil and gas reserves. Those potential opportunities include the Utica Shale formation, the Anticosti Island basin, and the Gaspé Peninsula (along with some offshore potential in the Gulf of St. Lawrence).
So Quebec is effectively being paid billions of dollars a year to not exploit their natural resources. That places their ostensibly principled stand against energy resource exploitation in a very different light.
You’ll need to search long and hard to find a Canadian unwilling to help those less fortunate. And, so long as we identify as members of one nation¹, that feeling stretches from coast to coast.
So the basic principle of Canada’s equalization payments – where poorer provinces receive billions of dollars in special federal payments – is easy to understand. But as you can imagine, it’s not easy to apply the principle in a way that’s fair, and the current methodology has arguably lead to a very strange set of incentives.
According to Department of Finance Canada, eligibility for payments is determined based on your province’s fiscal capacity. Fiscal capacity is a measure of the taxes (income, business, property, and consumption) that a province could raise (based on national average rates) along with revenues from natural resources. The idea, I suppose, is that you’re creating a realistic proxy for a province’s higher personal earnings and consumption and, with greater natural resources revenues, a reduced need to increase income tax rates.
But the devil is in the details, and I think there are some questions worth asking:
- Whichever way you measure fiscal capacity there’ll be both winners and losers, so who gets to decide?
- Should a province that effectively funds more than its “share” get proportionately greater representation for national policy² – or at least not see its policy preferences consistently overruled by its beneficiary provinces?
The problem, of course, is that the decisions that defined equalization were – because of long-standing political conditions – dominated by the region that ended up receiving the most. Had the formula been the best one possible, there would have been little room to complain. But was it?
For example, attaching so much weight to natural resource revenues is just one of many possible approaches – and far from the most obvious. Consider how the profits from natural resources already mostly show up in higher income and corporate tax revenues (including income tax paid by provincial government workers employed by energy-related ministries)?
And who said that such calculations had to be population-based, which clearly benefits Quebec (nine million residents vs around $5 billion in resource income) over Newfoundland (545,000 people vs $1.6 billion) or Alberta (4.2 million people vs $19 billion). While Alberta’s average market income is 20 percent or so higher than Quebec’s, Quebec’s is quite a bit higher than Newfoundland’s. So why should Newfoundland receive only minimal equalization payments?
To illustrate all that, here’s the most recent payment breakdown when measured per-capita:
 |
For clarification, the latest per-capita payments to poorer provinces ranged from $3,936 to PEI, $1,553 to Quebec, and $36 to Ontario. Only Saskatchewan, Alberta, and BC received nothing.
And here’s how the total equalization payments (in millions of dollars) have played out over the past decade:
 |
Is energy wealth the right differentiating factor because it’s there through simple dumb luck, morally compelling the fortunate provinces to share their fortune? That would be a really difficult argument to make. For one thing because Quebec – as an example – happens to be sitting on its own significant untapped oil and gas reserves. Those potential opportunities include the Utica Shale formation, the Anticosti Island basin, and the Gaspé Peninsula (along with some offshore potential in the Gulf of St. Lawrence).
So Quebec is effectively being paid billions of dollars a year to not exploit their natural resources. That places their ostensibly principled stand against energy resource exploitation in a very different light. Perhaps that stand is correct or perhaps it isn’t. But it’s a stand they probably couldn’t have afforded to take had the equalization calculation been different.
Of course, no formula could possibly please everyone, but punishing the losers with ongoing attacks on the very source of their contributions is guaranteed to inspire resentment. And that could lead to very dark places.
Note: I know this post sounds like it came from a grumpy Albertan. But I assure you that I’ve never even visited the province, instead spending most of my life in Ontario.
Which has admittedly been challenging since the former primer minister infamously described us as a post-national state without an identity.
This isn’t nearly as crazy as it sounds. After all, there are already formal mechanisms through which Indigenous communities get more than a one-person-one-vote voice.
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