A packed house at the St. Albert Seniors Association at Red Willow Place made the most of a planned visit from official opposition Leader Rachel Notley (NDP) in the running for Alberta premier.
Notley visited the St. Albert Seniors Association on April 4, less than two months before the planned spring election, slated to take place on May 29.
Notley credited the seniors for doing a great job of making Alberta a great province, and she tackled issues that are top-of-mind for many seniors: health care, pension security, and the cost of living in inflationary times.
The opposition leader said the NDP government will have laser focus on health issues. The answer to healthcare woes, Notley said, will be family health teams: family doctors connected with teams that include nurses, mental health providers, physiotherapists, to make sure Albertans get needed care.
“If you can’t see a family doctor, odds are good we’re going to pay for that down the road,” she said, citing the domino effect ending up in emergency, or chronic preventable illness and acute emergency conditions.
Along with the family health team concept, Notley cited evidence that early counsel for mental health episodes can help avoid long-term mental health conditions. She said there will be greater emphasis on mental health counselling, with access up to five fully-insured visits to psychologist per year.
Notley said her plan would see 150,000 more Albertans having access to family health care teams in the short run, with 1 million more covered by family health teams within the decade.
Pension and inflation
The notion of exiting Canada Pension Plan (CPP) is a non-starter for an NDP government, Notley said to a crowd of seniors, and guaranteed if she was elected she would keep Alberta in the CPP.
Responding to a question of married spouses having AISH benefits clawed back, Notley said it needs to be looked at.
“AISH is not supposed to be income dependent, it sounds like a quiet clawback that’s been happening,” Notley said, adding that the government has taken too many opportunities to bar people from AISH.
In addition to maintaining indexation of AISH benefits to inflation, Notley said an NDP government will go back and improve the base amount to what it would have been if the UCP hadn’t frozen it for four years. The opposition leader is suggesting the creation of an independent review on AISH administration for accountability.
Notley said current UCP government also severed indexation of tax brackets that had been designed to keep Albertans from finding themselves in higher and higher tax brackets because of inflation.
The provincial government has many ways they can help with the global issue of inflation, she said, including capping utility rates, insurance rates and tuition rates.
While the provincial government did re-index seniors benefits to inflation, indexing was undone after the last election by the incoming UCP government, she said.
