RDP Queens take their 20th ACAC title at home. Off to National Championships

Queens drop Rustlers in four, earn ACAC gold and trip to nationals

Brent Forster – Red Deer Polytechnic Athletics

Red Deer, AB – For the first time since 2014/2015, the Red Deer Polytechnic Queens Volleyball team has won Alberta Colleges Athletic Conference (ACAC) gold.

“I’ve always wanted to win a provincial title,” said Tess Pearman, a Bachelor of Education Elementary student. “The last regular season we had, we came so close. Coming into this year, that was our goal the whole season.”

In 2019/2020, the Queens earned ACAC silver and Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association (CCAA) national bronze. Then COVID-19 shutdown the 2020/2021 season.

In front of an energetic home crowd, the Queens were even with the Lakeland College Rustlers after two sets, but found an extra gear to win the next two sets and match (25-23, 23-25, 25-14 and 25-20).

“When you get down to the last match of the year between two first place teams in the league, it’s going to be a battle,” said Chris Wandler, Red Deer Polytechnic Queens Volleyball Interim Head Coach. “From the end of our last regular season match when we went five [sets] against Lethbridge and they battled us in the quarter-final, and again last night, that prepared us for this atmosphere.”

Pearman (8)

In a close first set, a stuff block from outside hitter Pearman bumped the RDP Queens ahead 11-10. Lakeland’s Jenay Varga kept her team close. With her fifth kill, the outside hitter had the Rustlers even 22-22. Ultimately, a dump ball from RDP setter Emma Letkeman sealed a 25-23 decision.

Lakeland outside hitter Mackenzie Yole’s third kill knotted up the second set 7-7. The teams traded points to 18-18. Rustlers setter Jana Laing continued the strong connection with Varga, who rattled off three consecutive kills to solidify a 25-23 win.

With a trio of serves from middle Sydney Rix, the RDP Queens captured a 9-4 edge in the third set. RDP’s Vanessa Loos entered the match and had an ace, which pushed the Queens ahead by nine (18-9).

“In a tough situation, we executed at a high level when we needed to and that was the key piece,” added Wandler. “It shows the experience and tenacity that this group has.”

The home team maintained that momentum and a late kill by Jaiden Ferguson, her ninth, helped the Polytechnic pick up a 25-14 victory.

Ferguson (9)

“Fergie had a hot hand last match, so she deserved the start,” said Wandler. “She got off to a little rocky start, but she persevered through that. She just needed to chip in where she could.”

Lakeland’s Avery Bates lifted her team to an early 5-3 margin in the fourth set with her seventh kill. The Queens started to climb back into the frame. RDP went up 14-10 off Pearman’s 12th kill from the left. The Polytechnic continued to push and solidified a 25-20 win, earning ACAC gold.

“To win this championship and to win it at home … I couldn’t ask for anything better,” said Pearman.

The Lakeland College Rustlers picked up silver.

Ferguson contributed 13 kills for the Queens.

North Star Sports Queens Player of the Game Pearman totaled 13 kills, 10 digs, one block, one assist and one of the team’s 10 service aces.

“When we needed a big kill, Tess got it,” said Wandler. “That just gave everyone a spark.”

Domoney (3)

When Pearman went up to accept her top player award, she insisted that Domoney join her.

“Kaylee, player of the game, for sure,” added Pearman. “She saves our butt every game and she holds our team together. She is an amazing player and deserves the recognition.”

Libero Kaylee Domoney was outstanding and picked up 17 digs.

“We haven’t played defence like that all year, mainly because we executed offensively so well. When you match up in championship time versus three defending teams, you have to match them dig for dig,” explained Wandler. “Our back row did a phenomenal job. Kaylee is our rock and everything we do is based upon her.”

Anna Carlson had 12 kills (0.455 hitting percentage) and five of the Queens’ 10 aces.

Rustlers Player of the Match Laing accumulated 35 assists and four digs. Teammate Varga had 18 kills, 10 digs and three of the Rustlers’ six aces. Yole added nine kills and Bates chipped in with eight.

The RDP Queens have won 20 ACAC gold medals.

“We had to earn this spot and that gives us a sense of pride to represent our conference – the best conference in the country,” said Wandler of the team’s trip to nationals. “It means a lot to represent those other 13 colleges in Charlottetown.”

The Red Deer Polytechnic Queens will compete at the CCAA Women’s Volleyball National Championship from March 25-27 in Prince Edward Island. Holland College will host the prestigious event.

“Our game against TKU really helped us. That was probably the hardest game I’ve ever played in my entire life – mentally draining and being down and able to come back set us up well for today,” said Pearman. “No more easy games. We have to fight for every point.”

Related Topics:#ACACChampions #QueensVolleyball #RDPQueensVolleyball #RedDeerPolytechnic

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Province introducing “Patient-Focused Funding Model” to fund acute care in Alberta

Published on April 7, 2025

Todayville

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.”

Danielle Smith, Premier

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.”

Adriana LaGrange, Minister of Health

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.”

Dr. Chris Eagle, interim president and CEO, Acute Care Alberta

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.”

Andre Tremblay, interim president and CEO, AHS

“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.”

Patrick Dumelie, CEO, Covenant Health

“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.”

Dr. Glen Sumner, clinical associate professor, University of Calgary

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.

Alberta

Is Canada’s Federation Fair?

Published on April 6, 2025

Todayville

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.

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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:

Equalization 2025-26 – Government of Canada

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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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.

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RDP Queens take their 20th ACAC title at home. Off to National Championships

Queens drop Rustlers in four, earn ACAC gold and trip to nationals

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Follow Author

Province introducing “Patient-Focused Funding Model” to fund acute care in Alberta

Alberta’s government is introducing a new acute care funding model, increasing the accountability, efficiency and volume of high-quality surgical delivery.

Share this:

Related

Is Canada’s Federation Fair?

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.

Share this:

Related

Mark Carney refuses to clarify 2022 remarks accusing the Freedom Convoy of ‘sedition’

Poilievre To Create ‘Canada First’ National Energy Corridor

Fixing Canada’s immigration system should be next government’s top priority

Are the Jays Signing Or Declining? Only Vladdy & Bo Know For Sure

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