Alberta Premier Danielle Smith speaks to the media in Calgary, on Sept. 18, 2023.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
The stench surrounding the Alberta Health Services scandal grows stronger by the day.
On Wednesday, the woman at the centre of the imbroglio, former AHS CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos, filed a $1.7-million wrongful dismissal lawsuit against AHS and Health Minister Adriana LaGrange. The allegations have yet to be proven in court, but even on their own, they amount to a devastating indictment of the culture surrounding Premier Danielle Smith’s government.
Ms. Mentzelopoulos claims she was fired after launching an investigation into various contracts awarded to private surgical companies, some of whose principals had connections with Ms. Smith’s United Conservative Party government. It is Ms. Mentzelopoulos’s contention that she faced “interference and pressure” from government officials to accept deals that were overpriced compared to other options.
Ms. Mentzelopoulos says that she had brought her concerns to the attention of the AHS board, which suggested she raise them with the RCMP, and that she had notified Ms. LaGrange in the summer of 2024 of the wrongdoing she felt was taking place.
In her lawsuit, Ms. Mentzelopoulos says the Health Minister met with the AHS board on Jan. 7 and insisted it fire the CEO. The board refused. She was fired the next day over Zoom by a bureaucrat who would replace her; after that, the entire board was fired.
If some in the Smith government thought a long-time bureaucrat like Ms. Mentzelopoulos – one with an impeccable, unassailable reputation – would simply go quietly into the night, they were wrong.
Last weekend, Ms. Smith said she did nothing wrong in this whole affair. She insisted on Wednesday she didn’t know anything about the entire matter until The Globe and Mail first broke the story last week. And yet, she also said that Ms. LaGrange had been looking into Ms. Mentzelopoulos’s allegations for eight months.
Ms. LaGrange insists that she repeatedly asked for information and documentation from Ms. Mentzelopoulos that substantiated her concerns, but none were ever provided. In her lawsuit, the former CEO itemizes several instances where she claims she informed her superiors of the issues she had regarding what was taking place. She also claims there were never any requests for evidence by the Minister.
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In her statement of claim, Ms. Mentzelopoulos says she also arranged meetings with senior government officials, including the then-deputy minister to the Premier, Ray Gilmour, on Oct. 4, 2024, to discuss pressure she felt was inappropriate from senior government officials, including the Premier’s then-chief of staff, Marshall Smith, regarding some of the contracts. Mr. Gilmour, according to the court document, said he would be “looking into it,” but Ms. Mentzelopoulos claims she never heard back from him.
And all of this happened, we are supposed to believe, without the Premier’s knowledge. The CEO of the province’s health services agency has all these concerns, ones raised directly with the Premier’s Minister of Health and the Premier’s own then-deputy minister, and yet allegedly, none of the details reached her desk.
If that actually occurred, which I have a hard time believing, then at the very least the Health Minister should resign immediately for dereliction of duty. I’d say that Mr. Gilmour should resign too, but he’s already gone from Ms. Smith’s office – he actually got a promotion, to interim CEO of AIMCo, the Alberta Investment Management Corporation.
In her lawsuit, Ms. Mentzelopoulos references highly disturbing communications she received regarding the whole matter. An AHS board member, for instance, allegedly told her to be “very careful” about the alarms she was sounding. The person said she should be concerned for her safety “given some of the people potentially involved behind the scenes.”
Ms. Mentzelopoulos said Marshall Smith called her on a September day in 2024 to ask about the status of negotiations on charter surgical facilities in Red Deer and Lethbridge. She says he told her that there were people involved with one company, Alberta Surgical Group, who were growing impatient with delays, and that they were “serious people – don’t mess with them.”
If even half of all of this is true, it would be grounds for firings. Unless all of this is just the fanciful concoction of an embittered former CEO, then this is the kind of scandal that brings down governments – and possibly puts people in jail.
It would seem from the lawsuit that Ms. Mentzelopoulos has kept meticulous notes and files on everything she encountered as she faced stiff resistance to the concerns she was raising about the province’s procurement process – one she apparently felt she was losing control over, because of political considerations.
Ms. Smith has been spending a lot of her time recently in the U.S. on the tariff file. I suggest she return home soon to address the growing crisis in her government. Her job may depend on it.