We may be looking at Premier Ed Stelmach’s legacy legislation in Bill 18, the new Education Act.
Throw in changes announced last week to decentralize decision making within Alberta Health Services and we may see the last months of our current premier as undoing part of the legacy of his predecessor, Ralph Klein.
In the past years, Albertans were told that they were not competent to make the hard decisions needed to control spending in the two largest and most public of provincial powers: education and health care.
In education, decisions on funding, planning and operations were so removed from local boards that people began to wonder why we need elected school trustees at all.
In health care, all pretense of local autonomy was abandoned in 2008, when the provincially-appointed local hospital boards (which had replaced elected ones) were disbanded, and ultimate power was given the Alberta Health Services superboard to manage our health care system.
That power turned out to be somewhat less “ultimate” than advertised, when Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky fired AHS CEO Stephen Duckett last fall.
When it’s tax money being spent, and when it’s a minister’s signature on the funding cheque, “ultimate” power will always reside with minister — as it should.
So far, it does not look like our elected school trustees will control funding for the local system.
We’ve seen this before: school boards make their staffing and program plans based on a pre-set funding formula and once the budgets are set, the province unilaterally changes the formula.
Taxes for our school systems are collected as attachments to the city property tax form, but the rates are set and money is collected by the province — and funding is doled back to the boards as the province sees fit.
The new Education Act doesn’t appear to change that.
So the local boards will continue to make three-year plans demanded yearly by the province, but the power to implement them in new schools or implement greater hiring will still come from the province.
Local boards can close schools — and take the flak for that — with the full blessing of “head office” in Edmonton.
Last fall, when Duckett dusted cookie crumbs off his suit on a flight back to Australia, health care was deemed too complex for local decision making.
This year, we’ll have five new senior vice-presidents — one for each region — who will take responsibility for health outcomes in their region.
Five Ducketts, if you will, instead of one.
They will direct the 85 vice-presidents responsible for various centres of authority in each region.
Part of the new directions will be to listen to local doctors (hopefully nurses and other professionals, too), via our local advisory councils.
All that is good. All of it also pre-empts what was supposed to be a thorough provincial study of health care delivery in Alberta, from wait times, to bed allocations, to treatment of health-care staff.
But one creating a legacy does not wait for studies and reports. One decides. One leads.
Even if that means going (part way) back to where we were in the first place.
Greg Neiman is an Advocate editor.