Inside Alberta’s ER crisis

Andrew Battison has been an emergency room doctor at Calgary’s Foothills Medical Centre for almost seven years. He loves his work, but lately he finds it to be crushingly hard. The waiting room, he says, is much more crowded than it was even a few years ago, packed with people who don’t have family doctors and who treat the ER as the gateway to the medical system. Battison is seeing patients with conditions that are often advanced because they haven’t been able to get an appointment with a family doctor.

In a wrenching piece for Maclean’s, Battison says he’s “overworked, understaffed and demoralized” by the state of health care in Alberta. He has joined 190 fellow emergency room health-care providers in signing an open letter asking the Alberta government to increase its support of the health-care system. “We’re backlogged,” he says, “because our primary care system does not have enough staff and beds to take care of everybody. There are thousands of sick people without family doctors who have nowhere else to go.”

—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief

In 2003, Jim and Wendy Gibson bought their very own B.C. gold mine. Now, the mine and its newly renovated cabin are up for sale—bulldozer and excavators included. There’s plenty of gold left to be found by future owners. “We’ve only scratched the surface,” says Jim.

Torontonians Alan Gertner and Emily Thring paid $210,000 for this prefab cabin, which was assembled on their remote, four-acre Georgian Bay island in just 10 days. It has a minimal environmental footprint and is made of eco-friendly engineered timber that mirrors the rocky landscape of the Canadian Shield and the Great Lakes Region. “We feel so lucky to have this incredible opportunity to commune with nature,” says Gertner.

THE BEST PLACES
TO EAT IN CANADA

Earlier this year, food critic and author Chris Nuttall-Smith set out on a 50-restaurant eating jag to uncover Canada’s 20 best restaurants. Everywhere he ate, he watched for warm service, reasonable value, spectacular cooking and, most of all, joy. In his list of Canada’s best places to eat now, Nuttall-Smith reveals where he found all of that and more.

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