With today’s $2.8 billion contribution announced earlier today by a clearly elated Premier Danielle Smith, Alberta’s Heritage Fund reached $30 billion — almost double what it was five years ago.For the premier, this is an old goal — she was writing 25 years ago that instead of spending resource revenues as they are received, Alberta should build up a fund to make up for when those resources, and the funds they generate, are exhausted..Speaking on Hannaford today, she commented, “At that point, (2001) we had made substantial strides in getting our provincial debt to zero, or at least putting money aside to pay it off. We were at a point where we were reducing taxes, and the only missing piece was building that fund up. If I remember what I wrote about at the time, it was that if we had saved the interest and the investment income in that fund by 2001 it would have been worth already $150 billion so I said, well, best time to have started would have been before, the next best time is now, and here we are.”The new goal is to build the fund to $250 billion by 2050, so that future generations enjoy some of the benefits of resource development in Alberta..Smith also talks about another old goal from her columnist days, that of changing incentives health care. When a hospital is funded by per-capita allocations, it has less incentive to be efficient than when it is funded on a fee for service basis.Smith: "The problem that we observed is that we were giving more and more money to Alberta Health Services — $3.5 billion more, quite frankly, since we became government — and they were doing fewer surgeries this year than they had done back in 2019. Meanwhile, we fund charter surgical centers on an activity basis, they got to do the work in order to get the money….“And as a result, we've seen that charter surgical services have increased their number of surgeries from 40,000 to about 65,000 over that same period of time. So that just got us thinking, well, if it's working over in this area of surgical provision, let's do it for everything. And we've already done our first step, doing an analysis of how much it costs to deliver basic surgeries for joints at different hospitals. And it's pretty dramatic. We see that there's an average of $8,800 at some of our regional facilities, like Medicine Hat and Lethbridge, and then it goes as high as $26,000 per surgery at places like U of A hospital. So that is really illuminating. What you want to do is you want to find out what the best practices are, and then you want to share those best practices.” .In other areas, Smith discussed how her government is focusing on reducing duplication and waste.She also also emphasized the need for federal action on Alberta's ‘nine demands,’ including repealing the West Coast tanker ban and the No New Pipelines Act.She also highlighted the shrinking case for continued Alberta participation in supply management for dairy, the importance of property rights, and addressing inactive oil and gas wells. Smith aims to double oil and gas production by 2050.
