Subhead:Will Carney cave to pressure and begin punishing Albertans until the province complies? Liberals tend to be more inclined to work to keep unions happy than to worry about the interests of Western provinces.#
The Canadian Health Coalition is a large lobbying organization predominantly funded by public sector unions and has been operating for over 40 years. It is influential on Ottawa politicians with an instinctive fear of clashing with organized labour, and the group is calling on Mark Carney to cut health-care transfers to Alberta.
Provision of health care is provincial jurisdiction. Ottawa uses health-care transfers as a mechanism to strongarm the provinces into maintaining the status quo in provision, however. While Alberta isn’t legislatively bound to follow the dictates of the federal government when managing health care, it can be punished as the federal government withholds transferring Alberta’s tax dollars back to it.
Ottawa has had a history of using Alberta’s health-care transfers to keep premiers in line.
The Chrétien government cut health-care transfers to Alberta in the 1990s because Ralph Klein had instituted some user fees in the system. Chretien then defanged Klein’s planned reforms to the system by threatening to withhold even larger amounts in 2000. It led to no changes happening within the Alberta system.
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