In February 2020, the Alberta government announced it would spend $400 million outsourcing surgeries to for-profit facilities in the province through its then brand-new Alberta Surgical Initiative (ASI). The stated promise of the ASI was simple: with more providers in play, surgery numbers would go up and wait times would sink to tolerable levels. Three years later, the data — mostly obtained through Freedom of Information requests — shows that a very different scenario emerged from the initiative.