Can Danielle Smith dodge and weave her way through the AHS scandal allegations?
Carrie Tait's bombshell exposé rocked Alberta politics this week
A quick note before today’s column: I celebrated a bit of a milestone at Daveberta this week, with this Substack now reaching more than 5,500 subscribers! Thank you to everyone who has signed up to read these columns and newsletters.
When I first sat down to start writing today’s column I was planning to write a follow up to my piece about Premier Danielle Smith’s reaction to American President Donald Trump’s tariff threat, but a week in politics can be an eternity and to say this has been a busy week in Alberta politics is an understatement.
If you read one news article this weekend, I strongly recommend it be intrepid Globe & Mail reporter Carrie Tait’s bombshell exposé about the United Conservative Party government firing Alberta Health Services CEO Athena Mentzelopoulos “two days before she was scheduled to meet with the province’s Auditor General to discuss her investigation into procurement contracts and deals for private surgical facilities.”
Tait’s story includes a letter from Mentzelopoulos’ lawyers that says she was fired as CEO “because she launched ‘an internal investigation and forensic audit’ into AHS’s contracts and procurement services.” The AHS board of directors was also dismissed on the same day.
The story and the letter allege senior political staff meddled in the approval of AHS contracts with private surgical companies that totalled more than $600 million. The story also draws connections to the UCP government’s fumbled $70 million contract for Turkish children’s tylenol and skybox tickets purchased for cabinet ministers and political staff during the Edmonton Oilers Stanley Cup Playoff run last year.
The allegations in this story include many of the ingredients of what makes a textbook political scandal, University of Alberta professor
writes on his Substack.Auditor General Doug Wylie released a statement after Tait’s story was published saying he has launched an investigation into AHS procurement and contracting processes to address "concerns or allegations related to contracting and potential conflicts of interest." But, as Postmedia’s Don Braid points out, independent officers of the Legislature who embarrass the UCP tend to find themselves without a job soon afterward.
In the midst of these scandalous allegations, the UCP government is currently in the process of a wholesale dismantling AHS in one of the largest bureaucratic restructurings the public health care system has ever seen.
Smith and Minister of Health Adriana LaGrange have argued that carving the single province-wide health authority into multiple separate “pillars” that administer different functions of the health care system will somehow make services more integrated and seamless. But anyone who knows anything about how government or organizations work will know that this kind of restructuring almost always creates bureaucratic silos that are much less integrated.
“The UCP is causing chaos in health care: focusing more on firing managers and CEOs than on hiring doctors and signing contracts with health-care workers to ensure staff can focus on patient care,” said Edmonton-Glenora MLA Sarah Hoffman, who was the NDP health minister from 2015 to 2019.
“Patients deserve a government they can trust to protect and strengthen public health care but what we have right now are a lot of questions. We deserve to know the truth,” Hoffman said.
NDP leader Naheed Nenshi made a fiery statement this week calling for an investigation into the allegations in Tait’s story and for Smith to resign as Premier.
But don’t expect the allegations of scandal to slow down the UCP’s drive to diminish AHS.
While Smith has had a chip on her shoulder about AHS since her time as Wildrose Party leader in the late 2000s, this dissolution and restructuring of the health care system is rooted in complaints made by influential right-wing populist groups during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Take Back Alberta was one of those influential groups that targeted AHS, public health officials and the health protections that were put in place to stop the spread of COVID-19 during the global pandemic.
The political action group that was issued a long list of fines totalling more than $120,000 for violations of the Election Finances and Contributions Disclosure Act this week played a key role in toppling Premier Jason Kenney in the UCP’s 2022 leadership review and rocketing Smith into the Premier’s Office in the leadership race that followed.
The political agenda enthusiastically pushed by groups like TBA was part of what led the UCP government to hire former Reform Party leader Preston Manning to author a report on the COVID-19 pandemic and appoint a task force led Dr. Gary Davidson, a well-known COVID response critic and former UCP nomination candidate, to review the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The task force’s membership included a long list of COVID-19 skeptics and conspiracy theorists, including Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s nominee to run the National Institutes of Health and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration.
The task force’s report was not well-received.
The Alberta Medical Association described it as “anti-science and anti-evidence. It advances misinformation. It speaks against the broadest, and most diligent, international scientific collaboration and consensus in history.”
TBA is also at the centre of a deep dive investigation by CBC reporters Grant LaFleche, Rachel Ward, and Mark Kelley about an attempt to censor books and programs at the public library in the town of Valleyview, located 350 kilometres northwest of Edmonton. Much of this hostility toward 2SLGBTQ+ materials and programs in public libraries is informed by conspiracy theories that are being effectively promoted by right-wing groups in the United States.
Because Alberta politics can sometimes be a game of six-degrees of separation, also named in the story is Samantha Steinke, a Valleyview town councillor and Vice President Communications of the United Conservative Party. Steinke is also a former president of UCP cabinet minister Todd Loewen’s Central Peace-Notley constituency association and was very vocal in the effort to topple Kenney in 2022.
A few years ago TBA looked politically unstoppable. But the group’s downfall should not overshadow that there are a dozen or so similar populist groups operating within and outside of the UCP - and many of them are organizing to support like-minded candidates to run in Alberta’s upcoming municipal and school board elections.
But back to Tait’s big scoop, it’s sometimes hard to tell what scandals will actually stick to a government. Smith is very skilled at dodging and weaving political attacks or just dropping off the radar until the story becomes old news.
From Trump’s threat of American annexation to striking education workers to re-opening open pit coal mining in the Rockies, there’s no shortage of news happening in Alberta politics to drive attention away from issues that might be politically radioactive.
Smith continues to command near unwavering loyalty from the UCP caucus and party, so it might take a lot of public blowback and the threat of fissures in the UCP for this scandal to actually damage the Premier.
Alberta separatists drive their own 51st State bandwagon
A lot of attention was focused on Trump’s tariff threats this week, but I’m not sure enough Canadians have paid serious attention to the American President’s ongoing threats to annex Canada as his country’s 51st State. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when to take Trump seriously because he is an arrogant agent of chaos who also wants to be seen as a strongman.
His comments about annexing Canada prove that he is not a friend to our country, is not a trustworthy ally in the White House, and is someone whose threats we should take seriously.
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