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Surrounded by parents, teachers and kids,
@RachelNotley announces she will make sure our kids get the attention they need in the classroom – hiring 1000 teachers/year for 4 years.
We will make sure the one million Albertans who need a family doctor, get a family doctor.
Today, bad UCP decisions have chased doctors out of Alberta, with no doctors taking new patients in Lethbridge, Red Deer, and the Bow Valley. Recent data shows that more than 650,000 Albertans have no family doctor, and that number is rising.
Physicians and health professionals are counting on Alberta’s leaders to reimagine family health care, so doctors spend less time doing paperwork and more time caring for you.
We are standing with family doctors to put forward a new plan to transform family medicine in this province. With Rachel Notley as Premier, we will bring forward an innovative plan for primary care that we call Family Health Teams.
Family Health Teams mean you have access to a doctor who works closely with other professionals like nurse practitioners, Registered and Licensed Practical Nurses, mental health therapists, pharmacists, social workers, dietitians, community paramedics, community health navigators, physiotherapists, midwives, speech language therapists, and more.
This will include expanding current clinics and establishing new clinics in high-demand areas so more Albertans have access to modern, innovative primary care.
Our commitment to integrated team-based care delivered in Family Health Clinics will mean that within ten years, up to one million more Albertans will have access to a doctor within a day or two as part of family health clinics.
The Alberta NDP Family Care Teams Plan will ensure:
- Better care and health outcomes for Albertans.
- Care closer to home.
- Access to a family doctor within a day or two.
- Great places to work and care for patients.
- Doctors who have time to focus more on medical care and less on administration.
- Decreased pressure on Emergency Rooms, EMS, and hospitals and lower costs for the acute care system over time.
Rachel Notley will implement this forward-looking report
It’s been a tough few years in Alberta. Years of recession, two major oil-price collapses, 40-year high inflation and a global pandemic have tested our province to the limit.
But Albertans are resilient, hard-working and entrepreneurial. We never give up.
Now, in 2023, the fiscal situation in Alberta has improved without any intentional government action. Thanks to high energy prices, Alberta has again been blessed by extraordinary surpluses and we are back at the top of the proverbial rollercoaster.
This presents us with a generational opportunity to stabilize our province’s finances and build a more resilient economy.
But we need to act now.
Last fall, Rachel Notley enlisted Todd Hirsch, one of Alberta’s most prominent and insightful economists, to advise on how the surplus should best be used to benefit Albertans.
Todd Hirsch was ATB’s Chief Economist for more than two decades and has also spent nine years teaching public finance at the University of Calgary.
After more than 37 interviews with economists, business and labour leaders, and public servants, Todd presented a report with eight concrete recommendations to help the Government of Alberta design a thoughtful fiscal strategy:
- Government should assign a fixed amount of non-renewable resource revenues (adjusted annually for inflation) that will be apportioned for base budgeting purposes.
- Government should consult with Albertans, and consciously determine a goal and purpose for the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund.
- In the absence of a constructive and thoughtful plan, debt repayment should be the default option for all surplus funds.
- The Government of Alberta should maintain the outer bound maximum net debt/GDP ratio of 30 per cent as a fiscal anchor.
- The government should establish a strong, credible and sustainable financial plan that will guide both revenues and expenditures.
- Alberta Treasury Board and Finance should maintain an updated model on the return on investment in three areas: debt repayment, savings and capital investments in physical assets.
- In years when total revenues and resource income exceeds expenditures, apply a fixed formula for how these surplus dollars should be allocated.
- A portion of the surplus should go into fixed endowments, to benefit Albertans in perpetuity.
Rachel Notley and the Alberta NDP have accepted these recommendations in full.
We recognise that it’s time to get off the royalty rollercoaster and build an economy that creates good-paying jobs, now and for generations to come.
We need a government that is thoughtful, deliberate, disciplined and forward-looking—and that’s exactly what the Alberta NDP will deliver.
Todd’s final, unofficial recommendation is this: bet on Albertans. That’s a message we can all get behind.
We will protect your pension.
Retirement is supposed to be focused on spending time with your families and loved ones.
But if Danielle Smith gets her way, she will play politics with your pension and could pull Alberta out of the Canada Pension Plan, risking millions of Albertans retirement security.
As well, in 2019, the UCP introduced Bill 22 with no consultation. The legislation dramatically restructured how public pensions were governed, affecting the retirement security of hundreds of thousands of Albertans.
It’s time for better leadership when it comes to your pension. We will legislate the protection of the CPP, by passing a law preventing any Alberta government from leaving the plan.
An Alberta NDP government will:
- Stay in the Canada Pension Plan
- Expand Private Workplace Pensions
- Reform Governance of Public Sector Pensions Plans
The Alberta NDP will protect your pension.
Remaining in the CPP will save hundreds of millions dollars that Danielle Smith would be forced to spend to start up and operate an Alberta-based pension plan.
From the pipeline technician who heads out in -40C, to the teacher who burns the midnight oil to plan the next day’s lessons, you and your neighbours work hard to keep our economy moving and create a province in which the next generation of leaders and innovators can thrive.
You deserve to know your retirement is secure, and you can count on that security with Rachel Notley and the Alberta NDP.
Well, we have a new Commitments section on the website that’s just for this!
Anything on this site is something we’re committing to do under our government.
This section is new on the site as of today and we will be continuously adding to it. Some things are not up yet (South Edmonton Hospital, Lakeview Business District, Morinville X-Ray, etc., but they’re coming!
Share this section early and often! It acts as a bit of a pre-platform section on the party website.
Universal access to free prescription contraception across the province…
The Alberta NDP will provide Albertans with universal access to free prescription contraception across the province.
Universal access to free prescription contraception in Alberta will ensure that all women are in control of their economic future.
This is good health policy, good economic policy, and it is the right thing to do.
This plan would cover oral hormone pills, contraceptive injections, copper and hormonal intrauterine devices, subdermal implants, and Plan B.
Universal contraception benefits Albertans from high school to perimenopause and could save someone buying monthly hormonal pills up to $10,000 in their lifetime.
Women deserve quality healthcare. They deserve health care that’s there for them, when and where they need it.
The Alberta NDP will always stand up with women, for women, and for the rights of women.
Simply restarting indexing does not undo the harm done to thousands of Albertans pushed deeper into poverty, during the worst inflation we have seen in generations.
All Albertans should be able to live in security and dignity.
When we were in government, vital benefits were indexed to inflation. In 2019, one of the first things the UCP did was to cut benefits for seniors and vulnerable Albertans; the Seniors Benefit, Income Supports and AISH payments were no longer increased to keep in line with the cost of living.
This cruel decision pushed already financially vulnerable Albertans further into poverty.
Simply restarting indexing does not undo the harm done to thousands of Albertans pushed deeper into poverty, during the worst inflation we have seen in generations.
An Alberta NDP government will immediately increase the value of these benefits to where they should be if they had kept pace with the cost of living, and then index to inflation from there.
EDMONTON –
Oilpatch support for Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s agenda ballooned after she won her party’s leadership and put the so-called RStar program — a plan to give tax breaks to energy companies for fulfilling cleanup work they are already obliged to do — high on the government agenda.
Elections Alberta records and an analysis by The Canadian Press suggest donations to the Alberta First Initiative, a pro-Smith advocacy group, increased eightfold from companies associated with the energy industry after Smith became premier. While the Initiative says it does not support RStar, its founder previously worked with a group that promoted it.
The Initiative also appears to have participated in Smith’s successful campaign to win the United Conservative Party leadership, which she sought after leaving Alberta Enterprise Group, a business group that lobbied in favour of RStar. The Initiative is now funding attack ads against the New Democrat Opposition and supporting Smith as the province gears up for a spring election.