EDMONTON – A recent Queen’s University study, commissioned by the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions (CFNU), confirms a dramatic increase in public money spent on wasteful, for-profit health care services, says the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE).
The study found that Canadian health care facilities paid $1.5 billion or more to for-profit staffing agencies last year, six times more than what was spent in 2020.
“The obscene funneling of public dollars to private operators is yet another symptom of a grossly ideological approach to managing our health care system,” says AUPE Vice-President Curtis Jackson, who chairs the union’s Anti-Privatization Committee.
“Public funding should be spent on in-house staffing, wages, and wellbeing for public sector health care workers and patients,” he says. “Our governments should be focused on recruiting and retaining staff to fix the system, not turning it over to agencies that care more about profit than helping patients.”
Instead, Alberta’s provincial government has chronically underfunded public health care, focused on needless and at times harmful restructuring, taken steps to privatize public care, and picked fights with health care workers. Outsourcing nursing care will not help health care workers, who have long been overworked and undercompensated.
“The solution is not to waste public dollars on a private service at a higher cost. The solution is to create conditions that support and retain essential workers within the publicly delivered system,” says Jackson.
AUPE is western Canada’s largest union, standing 95,000 members strong. Health care workers are among the 82,000 AUPE members currently bargaining for improved wages, benefits, and working conditions.
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Vice-president Curtis Jackson is available for interviews.
Please contact Kavi Chahal, Communications Officer: 780-729-5108 or k.chahal@aupe.org.