Like Ontario, Alberta is anticipating a significant deficit for the coming year — $4.7 billion in a province of slightly more than 3 million people. Unlike Ontario, Alberta is significantly reinvesting in health care. Most of the $1.7 billion in increased spending will go to healthcare, representing a stunning 16.6 per cent increase. Further, the province is committing to six per cent increases in health spending over the next three years. By contrast, Ontario’s budget planning exercise only envisioned up to a two per cent increase in funding for hospitals this year. There has been no indication of what lies beyond 2010/11. Alberta does plan to use much of that increase to enhance physician salaries, buy more specialty cancer drugs and fill in the debt hole from recent years of underfunding.
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OPSEU Diablogue 
I worked in healthcare in Alberta in the 1990s – so when I moved to Ontario, I was suprised to see that ON was about 5 years behind what Alberta was doing. We are still about 5 years behind – Alberta recently merged it’s local health authorities into one Province-Wide health authority, when it discovered that a bunch of local health authorities didn’t work as well as one central one; and now we in Ontario are just starting to get our LHINs up and running. In a few years we’ll discover that they don’t work, and we’ll go back to a centralized system as well. It’s the same with health-care spending. We’ll see these big increases in spending in about 5 years that Alberta is doing now. Until then, people will suffer and die needlessly. Too bad no one has the forethought to look to see what other provinces are doing – and prevent making the same mistakes others have. It would be great if we could learn from other’s mistakes instead of having to make them on our own.