Friends of Medicare holds petition and empowers uni student

By Lethbridge Herald on March 6, 2026.

By Alexandra Noad

Local Journalism Initiative Reporter-Lethbridge Herald

Friends of Medicare says they believe the implementation of Bill 11 will introduce an American style two-tier healthcare system to Alberta and are currently gathering signatures for a petition to table at the legislature during the spring session.

Chris Galloway, executive director of Friends of Medicare, says the petition is asking the government to appeal the bill and focus on increasing capacity and public workforce.

He adds that providing funding in the budget for building new urgent care and cardiac centres is needed, but without a plan to staff the centres is only addressing one piece of the issue.

“It’s really easy to announce the infrastructure and the equipment, but we would love to see a plan for staffing and what we’ve seen under this government is things like the Calgary Cancer Centre, where they finally opened the building, but haven’t expended the staffing to actually use the extra space to expand cancer care capacity and our wait times are growing.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Galloway helped a couple of young volunteers from the university gather signatures for the petition.

One of the volunteers, Tess McKenna says many young people feel disconnected from healthcare issues happening around the province and hopes to encourage them to be engaged because everyone needs to be able to access healthcare at some point in their life.

“No one is an exception to needing healthcare at a certain point in our lives-that’s something we all need and young people are disconnected from that,” says McKenna. “So, as a young person on a university campus, I really hope to try and make that clear to other people that might not be thinking about it as much as I think they should be.”

In a world where news seems to be coming at us faster than the speed of light, it sometimes can make one feel debilitated, but McKenna believes taking action where you can, can really lift a burden.

“I think talking about the things (you’re seeing), that’s really important and then trying to be active, start channelling those feelings into something productive, it truly helps and I say that as someone who’s really struggled with it.”

Friends of Medicare will be hosting their second annual Women’s Brunch on April 18 which will include a brunch, a chance to mingle and a panel talking about menopause.