Alberta passed a physician pay disclosure law in 2020. It has never published a name.

On paper, Alberta has one of the strongest physician pay transparency laws in Canada. The Physician Payment Disclosure Regulation (Alberta Regulation 162/2020) requires the Minister of Health to publish, for every physician, every fiscal year: their name, the city or town where they provided most of their services, their primary specialty, their gross fee-for-service payments, the number of discrete patients they saw, and the days they worked. There is no dollar threshold. Every paid physician is covered.

The first disclosure, covering fiscal 2017-18 through 2019-20, was due within months of the regulation taking effect in 2020. CBC reported at the time that billings would be public "within the next two months."

More than five years later, no disclosure has ever been published.

We searched Alberta's open-data portal exhaustively, along with alberta.ca and the regulation's program pages. The pages that once explained how physicians could apply for exemptions have been removed; an archived copy from 2023 still promised context "when the payments are posted." The regulation itself remains in force, amended as recently as 2025, with the disclosure duty intact and unmet. Alberta is absent from every list of provinces that publish physician payments, and it does not appear in national data journalism that relied on those disclosures.

What Alberta publishes instead

The only official window into Alberta physician pay is aggregate: the AHCIP statistical supplement, whose most recent open-data tables cover fiscal 2021-22. They show $4.04 billion in gross fee-for-service payments across 9,769 physicians, and specialty medians ranging from under $20,000 (pathology, which is mostly paid outside fee-for-service) to $996,013 for diagnostic radiology. Useful, but three years stale and anonymous by design: you can see what radiologists earn as a group, but not whether your surgeon bills like a Calgary median or a small-town outlier.

Why it matters for the rural question

Our reports on rural physician pay and the rural surgical premium rest on Manitoba and BC data because those provinces publish physician payments by name. Alberta's unpublished list was designed to include exactly the fields that analysis needs: pay, specialty, and practice city, for every physician. If the province ever complies with its own regulation, Alberta becomes the best rural pay dataset in the country overnight. Until then, the prairie province between BC and Manitoba is a blank space on the physician pay map.

Where each province actually stands

A law that is never enforced is indistinguishable from no law. Albertans were promised this list in 2020. It is still owed.