Chapter Three — The Looting Continues Not every chapter in this mega-thread needs a notwithstanding clause taped to its forehead. Some of the most consequential damage happens another way: through restructuring, procurement, administrative rewiring, and the steady conversion of public systems into marketplaces with government stationery. That is where Bill 11 lives. It is not the override chapter. It is the extraction chapter. Bill 11, the “Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2025 (No. 2),” was introduced on November 24, 2025. It moved through second reading on November 26 and 27, was still active on December 1, passed third reading on December 10, and received Royal Assent on December 11. On its face, the government sold it as modernization: more flexibility for physicians, updated drug coverage rules, health-card changes, and administrative support for the province’s refocused health system. That is the brochure. The blueprint underneath it is something else. Alberta’s own Bill 11 page says the legislation would let employers offer employees access to private physician services through benefit plans, move public drug coverage toward a payor-of-last-resort model, modernize health cards, amend the “Health Information Act,” and help complete the transition of Alberta Health Services into a hospital-based acute care service provider. Read that slowly. “Flexibility” for physicians. Private access through benefit plans. Public coverage stepping back. AHS narrowed into one piece of a fragmented system. None of that reads like neutral housekeeping unless you are determined to confuse demolition with renovation. This is why Bill 11 belongs in this project. Because the governing pattern is the same even when the instrument changes. In Chapter One, the government used section 33 to impose control in a labour crisis. Here, it uses statutory restructuring and market openings to push health care further toward a private-pay, private-delivery model while insisting it is merely improving access. Different mechanism, same instinct: centralize control, weaken public-system guardrails, and sell the change as common sense. Critics were not subtle about what they thought this meant. Friends of Medicare said Bill 11 created the legal framework for American-style two-tier care, arguing that allowing physicians to work in both the publicly funded and private-pay systems and permitting workplace plans to buy access to physician services would open a door no other province had opened in the same way. You do not have to adopt every inch of that language to grasp the substance of the warning. The bill was not simply streamlining forms at the registry counter. It was rearranging who gets access, who pays first, and who gets left to wait. And Bill 11 did not arrive in a vacuum. It landed in a health-care environment already thick with scandal, privatization fallout, and procurement smoke. In March 2025, Parkland Institute’s “Operation Profit” reported that the average cost of outsourced procedures under the Alberta Surgical Initiative rose 52 per cent from 2022-23 to 2023-24, and 79 per cent since 2019. The same report said payments to for-profit surgical facilities had increased 225 per cent since the initiative began, while hospital surgical activity slightly declined and wait times worsened for nine of 11 priority procedures tracked by CIHI. That is not the profile of a privatization miracle. That is the profile of a public system being drained so someone else can invoice it. Parkland connected its privatization cost findings to the procurement controversy that erupted after former AHS CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos was dismissed in January 2025. What is confirmed is that she filed a wrongful dismissal lawsuit, that the defendants filed formal statements of defence, and that her allegations of political pressure around private surgical contracting involving Alberta Surgical Group and MHCare remain contested and unproven in court. What is also confirmed is that this did not remain a routine employment dispute: AHS paused certain contract awards while reviews proceeded, the Auditor General opened an examination into procurement and contracting at Alberta Health and AHS, and the RCMP had executed multiple search warrants by March 2026. Then there is DynaLife, the province’s standing reminder that Alberta’s health privatization adventures keep arriving dressed as efficiency and leaving dressed as a postmortem. In November 2025, the Auditor General reported that AHS began outsourcing community lab services in late 2019, signed a $4.8 billion contract with DynaLIFE in May 2022, and terminated it in August 2023 at the owners’ request. The Auditor General said the process was marked by failures in governance, oversight, financial management, procurement discipline, and records management, with non-value-add taxpayer costs running into nine figures. This is not some ancient cautionary tale from a different political era. It is recent history. And Bill 11 asks Albertans, essentially, to trust the same people with a fresh round of structural health-care experimentation. Bold move. Terrible résumé. The transparency problem sits in the middle of this chapter too. In early August 2025, the government quietly changed its expense-disclosure policy, removed the requirement to post receipts over $100, and pulled eight years of archived expense reports from public view. After backlash, cabinet reversed course later that month and said it would restore the previous policy, with accommodation address information redacted for security reasons. Alberta’s current expense-disclosure page once again says receipts over $100 for senior political officials will be posted. That episode matters because it happened right in the middle of a period when health contracting, influence, and spending were already under scrutiny. When the heat goes up and the receipts briefly disappear, people notice. They should. Bill 11 also carried privacy and accountability concerns inside the statute itself. On December 1, Alberta’s Information and Privacy Commissioner said some amendments in the bill were positive but warned there were “significant gaps,” including problems with the proposed shared-custodian model for health information, new authorities for data sharing and automated systems, risks tied to putting personal health numbers on driver’s licences or ID cards, and a lack of adequate whistleblower protection against retaliation. When the province’s independent privacy watchdog is telling you that your health-information overhaul expands sharing and automation without properly balancing Albertans’ rights, that is not a side note. That is a flare gun. And the legislative contrast was almost too neat. On November 26, 2025, MLA Sweet introduced Bill 204, the “Public Interest Disclosure (Publicly Funded Health Entity Whistleblower Protection) Act.” It passed first reading and reached second reading on December 1, where debate was adjourned. It went no further. So in the same session, the government’s major health restructuring bill kept moving, while a private member’s bill aimed at strengthening whistleblower protections in publicly funded health entities stalled almost immediately. That does not prove intent by itself. But it does illuminate priorities with all the subtlety of a floodlight. This is the larger point: Bill 11 was not dangerous only because of one clause or one headline. It was dangerous because it arrived as the legislative arm of a broader governing pattern already visible in Alberta health care. Outsourcing justified by access. Cost growth justified by urgency. Fragmentation justified by modernization. Public concern managed through messaging. Transparency weakened when scrutiny got uncomfortable. And always, always, the same implication hovering in the background: if the public system is stumbling, the answer must be to marketize it further, even when the evidence from Alberta’s own recent experiments keeps screaming the opposite. Why it matters: Bill 11 pushed Alberta further toward a system in which access, delivery, and financing can be split, layered, and monetized, while accountability gets murkier and public protections struggle to keep up. It did not need a notwithstanding clause to fit this government’s model. It fit the model because it turned health care into another site where public systems are weakened, private channels are expanded, and scrutiny becomes an obstacle to manage rather than a duty to respect. Final Thought Bill 11 was sold as support for a “world-class health care system.” That phrase has become one of those political labels that means whatever it needs to mean while the machinery underneath gets quietly rearranged. A world-class system does not need to keep teaching the same lesson. It does not need failed privatization experiments like DynaLife. It does not need outsourced surgery costs spiking while wait times stay ugly. It does not need whistleblower concerns, privacy warnings, disappearing receipts, or a courtroom full of allegations about contract interference hanging over the whole enterprise like storm cloud décor. What it needs is boring competence, strong public accountability, and a government that treats health care as a public good instead of a business opportunity with a press release attached. Bill 11 offered something else. It offered another swing of the wrecking ball, this time in a lab coat. bsky.app
Chapter Four — Neutrality, Apparently By the time Bill 13 arrived, the government had already shown Albertans two of its favourite tricks. First, call coercion protection. Second, call control common sense. Bill 13 added a third: call ideology NEUTRALITY and hope nobody notices the wiring.
@unroll.skywriter.blue Thread unroll, please.