Remember when the NDP were going to build a Super Lab in Edmonton? I recall they had the plans all done for it and I can't remember if they had broke ground on the project yet, but along came UCP and cancelled it. I know it was a long time ago, but reflecting on how the health care in the province continuing to buckle under stress, I would like to know more about the super lab situation. What was the super lab exactly and how would it have changed the healthcare landscape if it actually had opened? Why was it cancelled?
They had broken ground.
This has been a huge factor in driving projects out of Alberta.
My profession works adjacent to the development industry, and we have very few projects in Alberta because of these kinds of provincial actions. The UCP is driving away economic development projects and the SuperLab was just the beginning.
Their handling of the Green Line development in Calgary also fucked development.
Ending renewable energy projects was another.
The UCP is driving away economic opportunities on a large scale in Alberta. The push for a pipeline is to hide what damage they have done but if everyone could remember the last pipeline had to be purchased by the feds to save the project because Kinder Morgan couldn’t take the financial loss anymore.
Nothing has been worse for the economy here than the UCP.
Try explaining this to anyone out where I grew up in rural Alberta and you’ll just have adult men in a full screaming fit about how this is somehow all still Trudeau’s fault
Omg I know. They are literally so loud and don’t listen at all.
I literally have a profession that depends on development and mostly oil and gas, but I’m expecting to be sent into the NWT or Nunavut next field season.
Our political landscape is so volatile in Alberta, it is driving away industry in droves. It’s a big shame.
I literally live that shit everyday. There are a few unicorns out here that keep hoping for some common sense, but see very little of it.
Shits tough brother, here’s hoping we all make it. Happy new years
Same to you!🥳
bEcAuSe OiL aNd gAs ArE aLL tHaT mAtTeR!!!
I’m so fed up with the UCP and their supporters fucking this province.
Don't worry! Next year, we're going to have a referendum on separation, and developers will just rush in to be part of an unstable, new economy! /s
You are 100000% correct!!!
They had broken ground, it would have been over by the Neil Crawford Centre in Edmonton, it would have been done by now, AND everyone, including the lab companies, said that the privatization would fail. The UCP are fundamentalist "conservative" wack jobs that believe in BS like trickle down economics, and that private is always better.
I don't think they "believe" in trickle down economics. They know it's not real, they want us to believe in it so we don't mind when they get richer because as they say if they get richer, so will we! So the idiots think this is true and accept policy that robs us absolutely blind and fills their pockets.
They know none of us will get more money, and they don't care a single bit. Much like the albertans who vote them in, they are selfish to the core. I get mine, and I don't care at all what happens to the rest of you.
I always want to shake conservative voters and somehow get them to understand.. these people don't care about ANY of us except how many lives they can destroy to get more money. They don't care if you die, in fact they would prefer you do die if it makes them a dollar. They wouldn't allow a single DIME to trickle down.
They are dragons on their hoard, and they only ever want more. Being richer than anyone ever doesn't stop them. More more more.
It's the very same with billionaires.
They'll destroy the world for money they can't spend in 100 lifetimes.
And those same people will constantly bitch and moan about public services getting worse quality wise, time wise, and service wise. Or infrastructure decaying and not being maintained properly
As if you can improve services and things like healthcare while constantly cutting funding and staffing for them. Or in the case of AHS, underfunding it, restructuring it to make it LESS efficient, INCREASING middle manager bloat, and firing numerous boards that assumably got solid pay outs. But yea, let’s keep voting for the same because surely this time it will work out and they will fix things that they themselves purposely broke
The foundation is still there, they just covered all the concrete with soil and made it back into a sports field.
I worked with some fellas that were part of that burial with the contractor. They were claiming it was a cost of $12 million to cancel the project. Can that be confirmed some how. I was working on the Calgary Cancer Center Construction at the time. Good thing we were well on our way by the time the UCP got elected..
Omg....what a fucking waste!
Conservatives are touted by their believers as fiscally responsible.
This is just one example their “fiscally responsible” government.
Private is always better if you are the one with the private clinic.
It currently is fenced off but some intrepid hero keeps cutting a hole in the chain link fence and sometimes you'll see it used as an impromptu offleash dog area. As the populace demanded.
The story of the superlab begins in May 2016, when a review of lab services by the Health Quality Council of Alberta suggested moving the province to a "single public sector platform."
Later that year, it came to light that Alberta Health Services was planning to buy out the private lab testing company Dynalife and transfer services back to the province.
But the true start came in December 2017 when Sarah Hoffman, health minister in Rachel Notley's NDP government, announced plans for a new integrated facility — the superlab — on land already owned by the province near the University of Alberta's South Campus.
The new facility would consolidate lab test processing under a single roof but not change where Albertans got their testing done. Hoffman promised a streamlined system that would produce quick and efficient test results.
Construction was expected to begin in 2019 and be completed by 2022.
The pronouncement that a UCP government would cancel the lab was criticized by the Health Sciences Association of Alberta, a union representing thousands of healthcare workers, who said the Dynalife location was stretched to the limit and a new lab had to be built.
In June, it became official: the superlab was cancelled, alongside the planned $50-million buyout of Dynalife. The newly-elected government said $23 million of the planned $595-million capital budget for the project had already been spent.
link
.........
The UCP cancelled a publicly funded lab that would service all of Alberta and instead wasted millions of dollars and planning in order to keep taxpayer money funneled into private institutions. The UCP then continued wasting our money on themselves with the Dynalife scandal.
..........
Alberta’s auditor general estimates the government’s failed effort to privatize community lab testing services left taxpayers on the hook for about $109 million.
The 15-year deal, valued at about $4.8 billion, was signed in the spring of 2022, setting the stage for DynaLife to privatize lab testing services across Alberta. The company already operated community labs in Edmonton.
In a matter of months, wait lists ballooned and reports of testing errors emerged. The company requested additional funding so it could meet expectations, but was denied, leading it to ask that the contract be terminated.
The province bought out the company in 2023 and returned lab testing to the public system under Alberta Precision Laboratories.
Wylie’s report pegged the buyout cost alone at $32 million including liabilities, while $77 million could be considered sunk costs.
The province initially expected to save $102 million through the endeavour, a figure derived from an Ernst and Young report the United Conservative Party commissioned to find ways to cut costs at Alberta Health Services, the provincial health authority at the time.
When AHS later did its own financial digging, the estimated savings started to tank. A calculation error was found in the Ernst and Young report, and AHS analysis pegged savings at around $18 million, with a maximum of $36 million.
But those savings would also be found by making the opposite decision and turning lab testing into a publicly operated service.
According to Wylie’s report, the health minister was briefed on the reduced savings but directed AHS to carry on.
After DynaLife was chosen as the preferred candidate and negotiations began, Wylie wrote, AHS determined — despite a faulty financial analysis that didn’t test saving assumptions presented by the company — that “even under the most optimistic assumptions, the costs under the proposed contract would be equivalent to current expenditures.”
Again, the minister directed AHS to proceed, and the contract was signed.
Wylie said his investigation was somewhat hindered because some documents he requested were withheld or heavily redacted, including 1,200 that were completely redacted.
He said AHS and the government claimed legal and cabinet privilege over many documents, in some instances without clear reasoning.
Wylie also said some records his office requested were destroyed, including notebooks kept by a former chief executive officer of AHS fired in 2024.
His report says it’s not known what impact the redacted or missing documents had on his investigation or how they would’ve influenced what he reported.
“The issue wasn’t government policy, the issue was interference and corruption and a government that cared more about moving privatization and being American-style in how they deliver health care than actually cared about patient well-being or the taxpayer,” Hoffman said.
link
I get so upset at the idea of how much better Alberta would be had the NDP won a 2nd time. We were so fucking close.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/whatever-happened-to-the-alberta-superlab-1.5693158
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-superlab-remediation-1.5821590
One aspect I dont see talked about often is the actual staffing and logistical benefits of a super lab, and how losing that really shot Alberta in the foot. I'm a laboratory technologist (MLT) and it is beyond frustrating.
The biggest efficiency gain in laboratory medicine is specimen throughput. The instruments required for high volume testing are huge, and they can process hundreds or thousands of samples an hour. This can reduce the cost per test dramatically - a simple glucose costs 6 cents on a high throughput chemistry analyzer but 30 cents on a mid sized instrument and up to $10 per test on a small rural single-use cartridge. It's obvious which option is the most cost efficient, which saves tax dollars. It also reduces staffing costs because if the majority of chemistry or histology testing is centralized, you don't pay for multiple smaller teams scattered across the province. There are limits to this because each acute care hospital needs to be able to run the basic critical tests, but anything that can wait 4-24hrs can be shipped to the central super lab to gain those benefits.
Also, the current Edmonton labs are just out of space. We are running more tests per year than ever on increasingly aging machinery, and there is nowhere to expand. It takes 3-6months on a quick timescale to validate a new instrument - and there needs to be the space to have both new and old running in parallel during that time because the lab can't simply stop testing in the meantime. Part of the plan for the super lab was to more microbiology there because all the huge fridges, freezers (-20 and -70), and incubators are so heavy that the downtown dynalife location literally can't put more weight on the floor or risk it collapsing. By planning for that in a superlab, reinforcement can be built in and the issue circumvented.
Like all healthcare fields, there is also a personnel shortage. To run the same number of tests, a higher volume labs need less staff than a bunch of smaller ones.
I could aay more but this is long enough. It was - and still is - so incredibly frustrating to watch this all spiral from the inside.
The piles were almost all already installed. I remember the Kenney cancellation of the project. My company was the geotechnical engineer of record.
Around 98% of everything the ANDP put into motion was cancelled by Jason Kenny in his first 4 months in office.
The ANDP put hundreds of millions of dollars into motion and the UCP cancelled all of it. All that money was spent. Invested into dozens of future projects. And Alberta got absolutely no return on the investments because the UCP couldn't have anything good come out with the ANDP's name on it. It's un-fucking-believable that anyone in AB could think the UCP was the better choice economically, unless they're literally brain dead.
I think a single pipeline was the only thing that survived the purge and Smith tried to take credit for it. It was a collaboration between the ANDP and Justin Trudeau, so of course they wouldn't give credit where it was due.
We contracted it out to Dynalife because it was waaay better value for our money……..wait what?
Work had already started. I deliver concrete, and I was there at least once.
They did break ground. UCP had to pay quite a few million to undo it.
It would have been a research facility in addition to doing lab testing. We could have been contributing to medical research but instead we have a $35 million field.
You have to realize that Jason Kenney wouldn't have been able to take credit for it, so it had to go.
I know so much about this, DM me for my email