Phillips: 2021 was “probably the most difficult year of my life”

This resulted in two key party members resigning, and five others losing their additional titles.

She was happy to see so many Albertans turn up for protests across the province in opposition to open-pit coal mine development in the Rockies.

Phillips also criticized the fact that over $1.3-billion was lost when the Alberta Government invested in the Keystone XL pipeline expansion, only for newly sworn-in U.S. President Joe Biden to cancel its permit.

Pandemic Policy-Making

Phillips extended some understanding to Premier Jason Kenney and his party for their leadership during the pandemic, although believing that better decisions could have been made.

“I think all of us understand on a certain level just how difficult it is to govern during a pandemic, but at every available opportunity where the UCP could have chosen a path that put our economy back on track, that saved lives, that invested appropriately in helping people in business through the pandemic, they chose not to.”

Despite COVID-19 being in Canada for nearly two years now, the MLA believes the reigning provincial party has “not learned a single thing.”

Instead, she tells LNN that Kenney has “doubled down on catering to conspiracy theorists,” including the “anti-vaccine movement.”

Phillips also called the Premier’s decision-making around the pandemic too little and often too late.

“Other provinces weren’t calling in the military, other provinces weren’t sending patients outside, you know, thousands of kilometers away to get health care. It was only us.”

Doctor Shortage

One thing that all too many in Southern Alberta know to be true is that there is a severe shortage of practicing family physicians.

In early December, local health professionals outlined to Lethbridge City Council that over 45,000 people in the area do not have a family doctor, or approximately one in four.

It is an issue that has been going on for a long time in Alberta, but one that has dramatically become worse in the last couple of years.

For almost the entire year, the AlbertaFindADoctor.ca website has not shown a single family physician in Lethbridge that was accepting new patients.

Phillips has been incredibly vocal on this topic and stresses that it is one of the most important matters facing those in her riding.

“We are not talking about niche specialties or specific services that may be experiencing some short-term shortages. Every single person needs a family doctor from cradle to grave. A family physician is the key part of healthcare prevention, of ensuring that we are getting the right care, the most effective care, the most cost-effective care that we possibly can get.”

There are, of course, many reasons for why this is happening, but Phillips puts much of the blame onto the UCP government and the way it has handled contract negotiations with physicians.

In February 2020, former Health Minister Tyler Shandro tore up the master agreement with the Alberta Medical Association, leading to a long, contentious battle between the government and medical professionals that is still ongoing.

According to Phillips, she and Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley met with a group of doctors after the contract was voided and what the potential consequences of doing so could be.

“They told us that this will mean that physicians will have to close up their practice or move or change their practice or limit their practice. They had been saying these things to the UCP for months prior to the pandemic, and not only when the pandemic started did they ignore all of that, they doubled down, they literally yelled at doctors on their driveway and picked fights with them in the media, and so a year later then, we found that physicians were beginning to leave and it was in spring of 2021 that it really started.”

“We started to get a few emails that started, and then by summer we were in a tsunami of emails from people in Lethbridge. Young, old, anywhere in between, cancer patients, cancer survivors, people waiting for surgery, saying I can’t get referred. There’s nowhere for my lab results to go.”

The situation progressed to the point where Lethbridge’s two MLAs, representing the NDP and UCP, were both calling for immediate actions to be taken to address the doctor shortage crisis.

Police Misconduct

The one issue that has personally impacted Phillips the most this past year was the numerous ongoing investigations into the actions of Lethbridge Police Service (LPS) officers.

These include matters where officers spied on her when she was formerly the environment minister, unauthorized searches of her personal information that were not part of an official investigation, police officers sharing offensive and derogatory memes about her and others, and alleged threats of retaliation against her.

Phillips says there are so many ongoing matters between LPS and herself that “even my mother can’t, at this point, can’t keep all the files straight.”

“2021 was a very, very difficult year for me. It was probably the most difficult year in my life for all the reasons that I just described. I have never in my life have had to think about moving my house or the safety of my children, and now I do. I think about that every day.”

Since many of these are legal issues that have not yet been concluded, LNN is only able to say so much on this topic.

Heading Into 2022

Despite all of the negativity of the past year, Phillips looks ahead to 2022 with a sense of optimism and hope that things will improve overall.

She says economic recovery will be a big issue for her over the next 12 months.

While Alberta’s Finance Minister presented a rosy picture of the province’s finances in November’s mid-year fiscal update, Phillips said much of that boiled down to “nothing more the luck” as most of the gains were due to global oil prices rebounding, something that no one provincial government has direct control over.

The MLA points out that Alberta still has fewer jobs now than at the beginning of the pandemic and the cost of living has been rising at a high rate.

She cites things like the cost of post-secondary and motor vehicle insurance rising drastically in recent years.

“That’s going to be my focus next year because people are hurting out there and they deserve a government that is focused on them and not themselves. All we’re going to see next year is the UCP trying to, you know, have Jason Kenney cling to power and do all kinds of dirty politics behind the scenes. So that’s just not what anybody hired him for. Our job is to focus on others and making life better for people, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

by David Opinko

Phillips: 2021 was “probably the most difficult year of my life”

What's Happening