Bringing 40,000 health care aides into full regulation is forcing an Alberta regulator to revisit its assumptions about risk, fairness and institutional change, says Katrina Haymond, the college’s first general counsel.
Haymond holds that role at the College of Licensed Practical Nurses and Health Care Aides of Alberta (CLHA), which, until recently, regulated only about 21,000 licensed practical nurses. She joined in February 2025 after more than two decades in private practice at Miller Thomson and Field Law, where she focused on professional regulation and administrative law, and she argues that watching those same issues play out from inside the institution is a fundamentally different exercise from sending opinions in from outside counsel.
“As external counsel supporting the college from the outside, the work was more focused on discrete matters like professional conduct … and certain specific registration issues,” she says. “When you’re in-house as general counsel, it’s a whole different level of involvement.”
Her path into this niche was not mapped out in advance. She articled at a small regional firm that became Miller Thomson and worked with a principal who was an administrative lawyer with a health law practice. “They had a small health law group, and [the principal] practised professional regulatory law and a lot in health privacy,” Haymond says. A difficult discipline file for a regulator showed her how abstract rules about remedies and the duty of fairness collide with people’s livelihoods, and that intersection quickly became the focus of her career.
She later joined Field Law, working with Jim Casey to build what became a significant professional regulatory practice. “I ended up going over to work with Jim to kind of formulate this group,” she says. Over time, she helped grow that practice, took on firm leadership roles and mentored associates, while running hearings and advising regulators across sectors.
She stresses that she “really loved” private practice, her clients and the type of work she did. However, a series of difficult family circumstances from 2019 to 2025 collided with her leadership duties and a demanding docket, and she began to question whether she could continue doing the work she cared about amid the unpredictable circumstances she faced.
At the same time, the College of Licensed Practical Nurses of Alberta, as it was then known, was planning to expand its mandate, making it one of the largest health regulators in western Canada. The Alberta government amended the Health Professions Act in 2020 so that health care aides would be regulated by the college, which would eventually be renamed CLHA. In the interim, the college operated a directory for thousands of aides without a full legislative framework. “They were regulating 21,000 licensed practical nurses [and] they were preparing to take on health care aides, about 40,000 new registrants,” she says. “So, I think our interests aligned at that time because they were aware that they would need … more legal support.”
Haymond joined in February 2025, with the proclamation of the health care aide regulations later scheduled for February 2, 2026. That year was dominated by the work of turning a directory into a legislated registry, including consultation on regulatory amendments, new standards of practice and policies and the basic question of how to move tens of thousands of workers into a formal regime without disrupting continuing care. “There’s just been a magnitude of legal issues that … you try to anticipate, but there are just things that come up,” she says.
Those issues range from registration policies for workers who have never been regulated, to transition rules for people on the directory, to questions such as “what are they struggling with, such as technology, and how do we accommodate for that in a way that meets the duty of fairness?” she says. Program-approval governance for post-secondary institutions, including the transition of ownership of policies previously held by the government, has added another layer of complexity and forced the college to confront how responsibilities and legal risk shift as functions move from the public service to a regulatory body.
The in-house vantage point has also reshaped how she thinks about risk. Instead of producing discrete opinions on narrow questions, she now spends time tracing how decisions in one corner of the college affect another, whether that is the impact of registration rules on program approval or the conduct implications of pre-registration behaviour. “I’m gaining a much better understanding of all of the college’s program areas, and I’m much better able to make connections about how … something in their registration might be related to something in their program approval of post-secondary institutes, and how those things all fit together,” she says.
She no longer runs discipline prosecutions but still weighs in on “high risk matters” and “tricky jurisdictional issues,” she says, leaving day-to-day conduct work to others while focusing on structural risk and precedent. Privacy sits within her portfolio but is shared with a long-standing privacy officer who handles most of the operational load, allowing Haymond to concentrate on the regulatory transition and the issues that flow from it.
One deliberate choice has been to build an internal legal education program for CLHA’s roughly 75 staff and its committees. Many are making regulatory decisions, applying legislation and writing reasons that could be appealed or judicially reviewed, and she wants them to understand the legal principles that underpin those tasks. “I want to empower people to understand legal principles and be able to make fair decisions that are well articulated,” she says. The training echoes the work she enjoyed in private practice, where she frequently ran sessions for regulators, and she makes clear that better internal understanding of administrative law is not a nice-to-have, but a basic piece of risk management.
For private practitioners contemplating a similar move in-house, Haymond returns to guidance she once received from former Field Law partner and now counsel, Justice Steve Hillier. “He once said to me, when you’re thinking of making a change, to assess two things. One, what are the things I would be leaving behind? And two, what is it I would hope to be gaining from this change?”
She uses that framework when she talks to lawyers wrestling with similar decisions and pushes them to look beyond the recruitment pitch and job title. “We like to think about the shiny new thing that we’re going to,” she says. “But I think you have to think about, ‘What am I leaving behind as well?’ And don’t take the things you’re leaving behind for granted.”
Over time, her own answers to those questions changed, and she concluded that moving to CLHA would mean giving up some hearings and some institutional familiarity while gaining a measure of control and a front-row seat to a major regulatory project. She acknowledges that she has left behind parts of private practice that she still misses, but she is clear that the trade has been worth it. “It’s been really exciting because I’m learning new things.”