Genevieve Simms

Every election campaign has a moment that clearly sets it apart it from any other election. For me, that moment crystallized in front of the former Holy Cross Hospital last week.

Liberal leader Kevin Taft was holding a press conference in a park — the privatized brick hospital looming in the background. It was one of those clear, sunny, dazzling Alberta days when anything seems possible.

Taft wore a camel-coloured overcoat and a Liberal-red scarf, and he was surrounded by local Liberal candidates and supporters waving red banners. The news media was assembled with cameras and notebooks at the ready. The anticipation was tangible.

Why? Because the day before, the man who runs the Calgary Health Region (CHR) — Jack Davis — called a press conference to announce that Calgary’s emergency wards were so overcrowded and plugged that patients who needed to be admitted to hospital were waiting 24 hours for beds. Davis said the CHR needed $115 million dollars right away if it was going to be able to meet the soaring demand.

It’s not unusual for CEOs of health regions to ask for more money. However, it is very unusual for a CEO long known as a Conservative insider to bring attention to a dire situation and then beg the government for more money right in the middle of an election campaign. Especially in Calgary, where “the party” always sorts things out behind closed doors. Of course, Premier Ed Stelmach could have rode to the rescue and looked like a hero, but he didn’t.

Taft pounced. He no doubt relished the opportunity to slag the PC record on health care. After all, health care shows up in the polls as the No. 1 issue for Calgarians. And the demise of the Holy Cross has long been one of Taft’s obsessions, but I’m sure he never imagined that during an election campaign he’d have Jack Davis in his corner; that he would even find himself agreeing with Davis. My, my, how times have changed.

Another fascinating tidbit: CHR board member Mairi Matheson was also on hand sporting a Liberal-red scarf as she chatted with reporters about the scary situation in emergency wards the previous weekend. Mairi is well-known as a Liberal, and she was board chair of the Calgary General Hospital when the CHR and the Klein government decided to demolish it. (Those of you new to Calgary can watch it implode on YouTube).

Mairi was later elected to the CHR board. Then the Klein government decided to annul regional health board elections and simply appoint its own people. Mairi managed to keep her position, but until now has kept her politics out of her work with the CHR.

To understand the import of all this let’s click back to 1996. The CHR had announced it was closing the General. A group of citizens against the closure organized public hearings in a community hall just below the hospital. Taft came down from Edmonton to say that the Klein government’s figures on health-care spending were fabricated to make things look worse than they were. He had proof, he said, because he had been a bureaucrat in the Getty government and in the early days of the Klein government. This was long before Taft aligned himself with the Liberals, and was the first time I had ever laid eyes on him.

Matheson spoke that day, too. She was passionate about the hospital; warned everyone that closing it would be a huge mistake.

Taft didn’t get any media coverage, Matheson’s plea was ignored and the General was eventually demolished. the Holy Cross was closed and sold; as was Calgary’s only maternity hospital – The Grace. Throughout all this, almost no one in Calgary with any political clout spoke out against the closing of these hospitals, even though the city was left without a downtown emergency department and short several hundred hospital beds.

So… on that sunny Wednesday morning last week it looked as though everything had come full circle. Taft was in the running to become the next premier. The CHR and the Klein government had been proven wrong, wrong, wrong; and the Stelmach government still didn’t get it. Davis ended up throwing political plums to Taft, one of his staunchest critics.

It was all deliciously political — something we rarely see in Calgary. For once “the party” couldn’t solve this one by meeting behind closed doors, by arguing public matters in private. For once, we all got to see that the emperor has no clothes — that Conservative party unity is a bit tattered — much like our hospitals.

It was just one brief moment. However, given that there are some close races in Calgary this election, maybe, just maybe, Calgarians are ready to join the rest of the western world and create a lively political culture. A city where dissenting voices are not only welcome but essential if we are to meet the challenges that confront us.

Gillian Steward is a Calgary-based journalist who has covered politics since the Lougheed days. She co-authored a book on health care with Kevin Taft before he became a Liberal MLA.