Health Care Corruption Allegations Rock Smith Government

It will be hard for Alberta’s United Conservative Party to shake off former Alberta Health Services CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos’s bombshell allegation that she was fired for launching an investigation of sketchy procurement deals and private surgical contracts pushed by influential staffers in Premier Danielle Smith’s government.

Mentzelopoulos’s claims are included in a long letter to the beleaguered health care agency’s lawyer threatening a $1.7-million lawsuit for wrongful dismissal that has been seen by the Globe and Mail but apparently nobody else in the news business.

Despite very few people actually having had the opportunity to read the accusations, though, the stuff didn’t just hit the fan when reporter Carrie Tait published her carefully crafted story Wednesday night. It set off a hurricane of the same substance that raged through the day Thursday and shows no sign of abating.

In response, Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi made a forceful statement Thursday in which he demanded not just one investigation, but four — one by the auditor-general, one by the police, one by the ethics commissioner, plus a judge-led public inquiry.

Calling the statements “among the most shocking allegations that I have ever seen,” Nenshi told a news conference that “the premier, the minister of health, the minister of mental health and addiction, and all named employees in these allegations, must step aside. They cannot operate in this role while they are under the shadow of potential RCMP criminal investigation.”

Fat chance of that happening, of course. There’s no way Smith, LaGrange and Mental Health and Addictions Minister Dan Williams are going to willingly put themselves on ice. And one of the named employees is Andre Tremblay, now the sole administrator of AHS. But it was an effective and spirited attack by the hitherto passive Nenshi.

“Albertans have never tolerated this kind of action from a government,” he continued. “I have never seen anything like this in Alberta. And, yes, Albertans need to tell the premier there’s no squeaming outta this one!”

I’m not sure if “squeaming” is a word, but we all know what he meant — Smith’s famous ability to glibly gaslight her way out of almost any tight corner, like, say, racing off to Mar-a-Lago and Washington to get no results on tariffs sucking up to the Trump administration. Nenshi said that he had seen parts of Mentzelopoulos’s letter.

That $1.7 million mentioned in the letter, by the way, is not a fanciful figure. It’s the total value of Mentzelopoulos’s contract had she been allowed to work until its end.

The UCP’s problem now is that the allegations are not about a highly technical or complicated topic. Nor are they about an issue that affects only a small number of people who most voters don’t care about. So they do not lend themselves to either gaslighting or MAGA culture war.

They are about allegations of greed, money and corruption, topics everyone understands.

As University of Alberta political science professor Jared Wesley explained in simple terms in a couple of Bluesky posts: “The litmus test for a government-toppling scandal: can it be explained to a 10-year-old in a single tweet. Here it is:

“Allegedly, Smith’s staff pressured health officials to approve over half a billion dollars in private health care contracts to a businessman who bought them seats in NHL luxury boxes in return for the favour. Then Smith fired a CEO who tried to investigate.”

Plus the board of directors that suggested she go to the RCMP, it must also be noted.

The allegations in the letter make reference to MHCare Medical, one of the medical supply companies associated with businessman Sam Mraiche, the fellow with the fancy NHL seats who is said to have done business with the province to the tune of more than $600 million.

As Wesley also noted last night, “No other premier in Alberta history could survive 48 hours under the cloud of suspicion Smith now faces. Over half a billion dollars makes Sky Palace look like a sandcastle. If her cabinet and MLAs aren’t meeting to discuss, it’s a dereliction of duty.”

There’s no danger, of course, that the UCP cabinet and caucus aren’t meeting to figure out what to do. You can count on it, though, the topic of their conversation will be how to move the scandal to the backburner and where to find an object large and shiny enough to distract the public.

There were some hints of the direction the government will try to take this yesterday.

Auditor General Doug Wylie issued a statement saying, yes, he’s looking into it. His investigation will include so-called chartered surgical facilities (UCP code for private surgical clinics), COVID-19 protective equipment (masks and respirators, mostly) and pain-relief medication. (Like, say, those notoriously expensive and hard-to-sell Turkish-made children’s medications).

The problem is that auditor general investigations take a long time, and there are no updates while they’re happening. Regardless of Wylie’s independence from the government, by the time his report is completed this news will be so old it’s not news at all.

Meanwhile, AHS said in a statement to media it will stop awarding contracts to companies being investigated by Wylie. This sounds like something is being done but means little, especially since AHS is still in the process of being dismantled by the UCP.

Indeed, the press secretary for LaGrange all but admitted this in a statement claiming Mentzelopoulos was dismissed, as the Globe summarized it, “because of the government’s continuing restructuring at the health authority.”

This seems at odds with the statement by former AHS board chair Lyle Oberg when Mentzelopoulos’s appointment was announced in December 2023: “I look forward to working with her to support staff through the health care system refocus efforts underway.”

“The interpretation that her termination was due to AHS’s review of certain procurement decisions are false,” the government statement reported Thursday nevertheless claimed. Well, we’ll see about that, I guess.

In the meantime, the UCP is going to have to do better than this to make this scandal go away.

Look for an outrageous announcement soon, likely with culture war overtones.

And expect dire news in the Feb. 27 budget speech — dire enough, presumably, to make us forget all about Mentzelopoulos’s allegations.