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Alberta

Ride With The Girls – “Elleboard” Builds Community for Female Snowboarders in Alberta

Published

5 years ago

4 minute read

Photo Credit: Canada Snowboard Photo Gallery 

Craft Beer Connoisseur and snowboarding enthusiast Sheena Keay pushes boundaries in snowboarding excellence through workshops and high performance coaching. An avid snowboarder for more than 20 years, Sheena’s passion for the sport began early and has continued to grow with every season. So, when it came to assuming a leadership role for the Alberta division of Snowboard Canada’s female rider program, she couldn’t say yes fast enough.

In response to a lack of existing resources and support for female snowboarders, Elleboard is a program launched by Canada Snowboard designed to encourage female athletes to grow and develop as riders, coaches, judges and officials. A short-term goal of the program is to have female membership with Canada Snowboard rise above 30% in the coming years. By creating a network for girls of all ages who want to feel more confident and connected on the slopes, Elleboard intends to bridge the gender gap on the hill and increase female participation in the sport.  

“The idea behind Elleboard is to build a community for females that want to continue to snowboard,” says Keay, Elleboard leadership for Alberta, “The average girl quits a sport between the ages of 12 and 14, and we want to change that.” According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, by the age of 14, girls are dropping out of sports at double the rate of boys their age. There are a number of key factors driving this statistic, including lack of positive role models and decreased quality of experience as they grow (1). 

Elleboard is a provincial program that connects girls with other girls who want to keep riding, continue progressing, and eventually compete. The program has trained with girls between the ages of 8 and 34 to help them take the next step in their snowboarding careers, whether that be learning the basics or hitting the half-pipe. 

With a variety of available training opportunities, girls can participate in Learn to Train days, with a focus on long-term athlete development, or sign up for the Ride Days program, a nationwide all-female tour led by top coaches that brings girls together on the hill for one-day sessions.


The Elleboard registration fee includes membership to Canada and Alberta Snowboard, which covers access to sponsored events as well as liability insurance for participants. Sponsored by Roxy, Elleboard currently holds 4-5 events a year featuring exciting prizes and increasing competition as interest in the program continues to grow.  

Determined to see the success of Elleboard continue and encourage more women to push themselves as athletes, Sheena Keay is exploring all possible options to increase awareness of the program. This includes hosting off-snow events such as yoga nights as a way to introduce girls to Elleboard and each other so they might make friends and build confidence both on and off the hill. Although the winter months are coming to a close, Sheena is committed to riding for as long as nature allows, which means hiking in the Rocky Mountains to find some summer snow even after the lifts have shut down for the season.  

For more information on Elleboard, visit https://www.canadasnowboard.ca/en/programs/grassroots/elleboard/. 

 

For more stories visit – Todayville Calgary

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Alberta

Alberta takes big step towards shorter wait times and higher quality health care

Published on April 9, 2025

By

From the Fraser Institute

By Nadeem Esmail

On Monday, the Smith government announced that beginning next year it will change the way it funds surgeries in Alberta. This is a big step towards unlocking the ability of Alberta’s health-care system to provide more, better and faster services for the same or possibly fewer dollars.

To understand the significance of this change, you must understand the consequences of the current (and outdated) approach.

Currently, the Alberta government pays a lump sum of money to hospitals each year. Consequently, hospitals perceive patients as a drain on their budgets. From the hospital’s perspective, there’s little financial incentive to serve more patients, operate more efficiently and provide superior quality services.

Consider what would happen if your local grocery store received a giant bag of money each year to feed people. The number of items would quickly decline to whatever was most convenient for the store to provide. (Have a favourite cereal? Too bad.) Store hours would become less convenient for customers, alongside a general decline in overall service. This type of grocery store, like an Alberta hospital, is actually financially better off (that is, it saves money) if you go elsewhere.

The Smith government plans to flip this entire system on its head, to the benefit of patients and taxpayers. Instead of handing out bags of money each year to providers, the new system—known as “activity-based funding”—will pay health-care providers for each patient they treat, based on the patient’s particular condition and important factors that may add complexity or cost to their care.

This turns patients from a drain on budgets into a source of additional revenue. The result, as has been demonstrated in other universal health-care systems worldwide, is more services delivered using existing health-care infrastructure, lower wait times, improved quality of care, improved access to medical technologies, and less waste.

In other words, Albertans will receive far better value from their health-care system, which is currently among the most expensive in the world. And relief can’t come soon enough—for example, last year in Alberta the median wait time for orthopedic surgeries including hip and knee replacements was 66.8 weeks.

The naysayers argue this approach will undermine the province’s universal system and hurt patients. But by allowing a spectrum of providers to compete for the delivery of quality care, Alberta will follow the lead of other more successful universal health-care systems in countries such as Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland and create greater accountability for hospitals and other health-care providers. Taxpayers will get a much better picture of what they’re paying for and how much they pay.

Again, Alberta is not exploring an untested policy. Almost every other developed country with universal health care uses some form of “activity-based funding” for hospital and surgical care. And remember, we already spend more on health care than our counterparts in nearly all of these countries yet endure longer wait times and poorer access to services generally, in part because of how we pay for surgical care.

While the devil is always in the details, and while it’s still possible for the Alberta government to get this wrong, Monday’s announcement is a big step in the right direction. A funding model that puts patients first will get Albertans more of the high-quality health care they already pay for in a timelier fashion. And provide to other provinces an example of bold health-care reform.

Nadeem Esmail

Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute
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Alberta

Alberta’s embrace of activity-based funding is great news for patients

Published on April 9, 2025

By

From the Montreal Economic Institute

Alberta’s move to fund acute care services through activity-based funding follows best practices internationally, points out an MEI researcher following an announcement made by Premier Danielle Smith earlier today.

“For too long, the way hospitals were funded in Alberta incentivized treating fewer patients, contributing to our long wait times,” explains Krystle Wittevrongel, director of research at the MEI. “International experience has shown that, with the proper funding models in place, health systems become more efficient to the benefit of patients.”

Currently, Alberta’s hospitals are financed under a system called “global budgeting.” This involves allocating a pre-set amount of funding to pay for a specific number of services based on previous years’ budgets.

Under the government’s newly proposed funding system, hospitals receive a fixed payment for each treatment delivered.

An Economic Note published by the MEI last year showed that Quebec’s gradual adoption of activity-based funding led to higher productivity and lower costs in the province’s health system.

Notably, the province observed that the per-procedure cost of MRIs fell by four per cent as the number of procedures performed increased by 22 per cent.

In the radiology and oncology sector, it observed productivity increases of 26 per cent while procedure costs decreased by seven per cent.

“Being able to perform more surgeries, at lower costs, and within shorter timelines is exactly what Alberta’s patients need, and Premier Smith understands that,” continued Mrs. Wittevrongel. “Today’s announcement is a good first step, and we look forward to seeing a successful roll-out once appropriate funding levels per procedure are set.”

The governments expects to roll-out this new funding model for select procedures starting in 2026.

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The MEI is an independent public policy think tank with offices in Montreal, Ottawa, and Calgary. Through its publications, media appearances, and advisory services to policymakers, the MEI stimulates public policy debate and reforms based on sound economics and entrepreneurship.

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