The following is an opinion column by BorderPulse editor Dan Gray.
Lloydminster, it is time to get angry. Once again, we are being treated like we don’t matter and we are stupid. Here is why.
They released the report.
That sentence is doing a lot of work. It is technically true. A document exists. Ministers made statements. A press release was distributed. But in Lloydminster, where residents have been waiting since at least the fall of 2025 for a $254,000 health assessment of their own community, “releasing” something and being transparent about it are not the same thing.
The province is hoping you won’t notice the difference.
I noticed.
What they gave us
Two ministers offered statements today. Saskatchewan Health Minister Jeremy Cockrill said the government is “focused on ensuring that patients receive the right care, at the right time, as close to home as possible.” Alberta Primary and Preventative Health Services Minister Justin Wright said the assessment gives both provinces “a shared understanding of local challenges and opportunities.”
Read those again.
Neither sentence commits to a single thing. Not. One. Single. Thing.
No investment. No timeline. No target. No acknowledgement of what residents have been raising for years: the aging Lloydminster Hospital, capacity at the Jubilee Home, specialist access across a provincial border that makes routine health care unnecessarily complicated.
That is not an oversight. That is a choice.
The document itself hedges just as carefully. Buried on page four, in language so nauseating, so bureaucratic it nearly puts itself to sleep, is this sentence: “While feasibility studies were out of scope for this project, any recommended actions would be explored by provincial service providers on a case-by-case basis.”
Read that again too.
They identified problems and they frankly don’t give a single care about fixing them. They explicitly chose not to study whether fixing those problems is feasible. And if anyone ever does anything about any of it, they will figure it out later, individually, case by case, on their own time.
That is not a plan. That is a shrug in a government font. This is what it looks like when a government turns its back on people they pretend to care about.
Then there is the “Next Steps” section. I want to be precise here because I think precision matters. The entire next steps section, in a document about the future of health care for 217,000 people across a 150-kilometre catchment area, reads as follows: “The priorities identified in the Lloydminster Health Services Needs Assessment will require further review and evaluation by the ministries and applicable health authorities.”
Further review. Of a review. That is the next step.
So, the definition of insanity, gotcha.
Lloydminster has seen this playbook before. A previous assessment was conducted in 2013. Some might argue the pattern goes back even further, to the late 1990s, when community builder Vic Juba was asked to form a committee to address the very same questions about health care in this city. Decades of committees, reviews, assessments, and shared understandings later, the next step is still further review.
We’ve waited years for a document whose own next steps literally say, we get the privilege of waiting longer, so exciting!!!
The comparison that should make you furious
The summary states, and I am quoting directly, that “overall, service levels are being met similar to other communities of this size.”
Other communities of this size. Like we are just another run of the mill community, not Canada’s only border city. When I took the job here, Lloydminster Mayor Gerald Aalbers told me I’d have lots of fun trying to get answers from both governments. I thought I knew what he meant, now I’m really getting the picture.
Lloydminster is not other communities of this size. Although it supposedly operates under one health authority, there is funding from both sides. Two sets of rules for everything from health card billing to ambulance dispatch. Residents on the Saskatchewan side of the street and residents on the Alberta side of the street can receive different levels of care for the same condition at the same hospital.
Comparing Lloydminster to a generic community of similar population is not analysis. It is dismissal. It tells this community that its unique, complicated, decades-long structural health care challenges are roughly equivalent to being a town of 33,500 anywhere else in western Canada.
We are not anywhere else. And they know it.
The capital planning section that mentions no capital plans
The document dedicates two full paragraphs to explaining how infrastructure funding works in Alberta and Saskatchewan. It describes Treasury Board reviews, Executive Council approvals, multi-year capital cycles, and SHA priority project processes.
Not once does it mention the Lloydminster Hospital by name. Not once does it mention the Jubilee Home. Not once does it apply any of that budget process language to a single actual project in this community.
It explains how money moves through government without telling us whether any money will ever move toward us.
That section exists to make the document look comprehensive. It is not comprehensive. It is furniture.
What “all of this” actually looks like
In fall 2025, residents were told the assessment would be released in January or February 2026. That deadline passed without explanation.
In February 2026, BorderPulse reported on the delay. The Ministry of Health responded the same day, insisting there was no delay. “There is no delay,” wrote Dale Hunter, a ministry communications officer. The report would be out in “early 2026.”
It was not.
In late May 2026, BorderPulse asked the ministry three direct questions: when the report would be released, whether the full and unchanged document would be made public, and why a report promised months earlier remained hidden. The ministry answered none of them. The entire response was one line: the findings would be shared “this summer once a date can be arranged.”
That is not an answer. That is a stall.
Around the same time, Cornerstone Planning Group, the consulting firm that produced the assessment, quietly removed the only publicly available summary of the report’s contents from its website. The page that had described a future-state service model across 13 service areas, the product of 35 clinical and administrative engagement sessions, returned a 404 error. No explanation was given. The province said nothing.
They scrubbed the one window we had into our own health care future and said nothing. Because they did not think we would notice. Because they do not think we matter enough to notice.
The clock
On May 26, this reporter filed a formal access to information request with the Saskatchewan Health Authority, seeking the complete, unredacted assessment as originally submitted by Cornerstone Planning Group.
SHA has until June 29 to respond. That is four days.
What was released this week is labelled a summary. The full report, the one that reportedly spans more than 200 pages, that includes detailed findings across 13 service areas, that contains the actual data behind these carefully vague conclusions, is not in your hands. It is classified in this document, explicitly, as “an internal government planning resource.”
Your health care future is an internal government planning resource. You are not cleared to see it.
Let that sink in.
What comes next
If SHA responds to the FOIP request by June 29 with the full, unredacted document, I will report on what it contains. If it does not respond, or responds with a redacted or incomplete version, I will report on that too.
What I will not do is treat a four-page summary as transparency. What I will not do is pretend that “further review and evaluation” is a next step. What I will not do is tell this community that a shared understanding is the same thing as an answer.
Lloydminster has been patient. Lloydminster has participated. Lloydminster showed up to more than 20 engagement sessions, told two governments exactly what was wrong, and waited through missed deadline after missed deadline while a consulting firm’s public summary disappeared from the internet and three direct questions went unanswered.
We gave them everything they asked for. They gave us four pages and a shrug.
We are not stupid. We do matter. And we are still waiting.
Dan Gray is the founder and editor of BorderPulse.ca. He filed the LA FOIP request referenced in this column and is a party to the information request. He discloses this dual role in the interest of transparency.
Read more: Lloydminster health report scrubbed, dodged and delayed
Thank you so much for letting everyone know about our health care report !
I’m sure that reading the articles written for this page would be both more enjoyable and less painful if the pages were not pulsating and bouncing about. Many persons reading these articles have eye issues to begin with, or they will be guaranteed to have them when they have finished. The advertisements that scroll through the “window “ at the top of the page cause the entire page to shift and jump. Please make this stop.
it is an issue I’m currently fixing, it happened upon site update and I’m trying to get to bottom of this. Thanks!