Bad government decisions tend to create a domino effect.
The Michener Centre fiasco, coupled with other ill-conceived decisions, helps to illustrate the point.
The closure of one local care facility after another, coupled with the lack of a coherent plan for future care, means each bad decision crashes into the other.
And there is no evidence of a plan to stop the cascading disaster.
That’s particularly true when you add recent announcements about reductions in funding for programs for people with developmental disabilities (a $42-million cut) and nursing home care (a $52-million decrease next year).
The options for forming and executing alternative plans seem remote at best.
Last month, Premier Alison Redford’s government announced that it would close Red Deer’s Michener Centre and all the residents would be placed elsewhere, some in the community and some in advanced care beds, as needed.
The province says it will save $110,000 a year, per resident, by shutting down Michener and placing the residents elsewhere. But it also says it must invest in more group homes to house the residents, and that some residents will need to be placed in nursing care.
Some of those people will stay in Red Deer. Some will go to other communities, closer to their families and guardians (assuming there are nursing care beds or group homes available).
The decision shows a startling lack of compassion, for the residents, their families and their caregivers. None of these people were consulted in advance of the decision; and none of them, it would appear, are being listened to in the aftermath.
It is also the kind of decision that fosters the enduring belief that government can’t be trusted: a previous promise to keep Michener open as long as it had residents has been broken.
Like many government decisions, the move is short-sighted and politically motivated.
In this case, it’s about the traction that can be gained by looking fiscally responsible to the broader constituency of Albertans.
But it is a callous decision that has been woefully misrepresented as progressive in terms of care, when in fact it preys on a group of extremely vulnerable, disabled Albertans.
It even has little to do with the care of the average disabled Albertan, because those who remain in Michener Centre represent a small and dwindling portion of the overall disabled population, and they are hardly average. Many are infirm and aged.
It’s all too reminiscent of the worst of business practices: focusing so desperately on the bottom line today that you lose perspective on the need to sustain your service into next month, next year or even the next decade.
And, like so many decisions made by four consecutive Conservative administrations, it demonstrates a complete lack of vision about future care.
A year ago, the campaigning Progressive Conservatives said they were committed to building 1,000 new continuing care beds in the province. Those beds, presumably, would serve both seniors and the disabled. Instead, we are getting cuts to care.
Two years before that, the government closed the aging Red Deer Nursing Home.
It replaced those beds but did not expand the care numbers significantly in this region.
Critics claimed a year ago that the number of nursing home beds in this community remained relatively the same as when our overall population was less than half of what it is today.
So the failure to foresee and prevent this crisis in care is a government fiasco decades in the making: from the early 1980s to today, we have only marginally added beds.
Yet our population is aging and, now, Michener residents will join an already overcrowded care situation.
Never mind that the province spends about $95,500 a year to maintain and secure two abandoned seniors homes in our community, Valley Park Manor and Red Deer Nursing Home, while it diverts care dollars to its private partners.
The guardians of Michener residents have every right to be aggrieved. They have been misled and their family members are being uprooted.
Albertans as a whole have every right to be furious and suspicious: which domino will fall next?
John Stewart is the Advocate’s managing editor.