Alberta Health Services CEO Mauro Chies.
Alberta Health Services CEO Mauro Chies, only appointed “permanently” last March, was pushed out by the Smith Government. Credit: Athabasca University Credit: Athabasca University

The politically inspired purge of senior Alberta Health Services (AHS) officials by the United Conservative Party (UCP) that has now begun is likely to paralyze decision making throughout the provincial health care system.
 
The six senior executives shoved out of their roles included the president and CEO of AHS, Mauro Chies, who was named interim president and CEO on April 4, 2022, and only assigned the post “permanently” in March this year.
 
Also “no longer in their role,” as just-appointed AHS Board Chair Lyle Oberg put it in a memorandum emailed to AHS staff, physicians and volunteers are:

  • Dr. Francois Belanger, Vice President of Quality and Chief Medical Officer
  • Colleen Purdy, Vice President of Corporate Services and Chief Financial Officer
  • Tina Giesbrecht, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary
  • Geoffrey Pradella, Chief Strategy Officer
  • Dean Olmstead, Chief Program Officer, Capital Management

Nothing in the memorandum indicated if any of the six will stay at AHS in other roles.

Let’s face it, though, no one can expect to remain very long in a senior health care position in Alberta as long as the premier is Danielle Smith, who for all intents and purposes promised health care chaos when she won the leadership of the UCP after former premier Jason Kenney was forced out by the party’s radical Take Back Alberta faction.

She is now delivering on that pledge. As Kenney used to say, “Promise made, promise kept!”

Readers will recall that during the leadership campaign, Smith vowed to replace both the board and CEO of Alberta Health Services. That she has now done, and then some, replacing the board with Dr. Oberg and five others on November 8.

On the night of her victory in the UCP leadership contest, Smith promised she would order AHS management to double the province’s Intensive Care Unit capacity immediately – a task dismissed by actual experts at the time as impossible – “and if they can’t do that, then we will find others who can do it for them.”

Perhaps that’s what happened to Dr. Chies and his five colleagues. We’re unlikely ever to be told.

Regardless of what it was, decision paralysis is likely to reign at AHS for the indeterminate future as senior leaders wait for clear signals from politicians before moving ever so cautiously to do anything.

With the health care system still recovering from the pandemic, continuing to experience large numbers of COVID-19 hospitalizations, and coping with a worldwide shortage of nurses, doctors and other health care professionals, the impact of an apparent purge is likely to make things worse.

Getting rid of the six executives will also be expensive – although it’s unlikely to burn through all of the $45 million in labor relations costs forecast in the leaked briefing document about the planned breakup of Alberta Health Services.

An updated corporate organization list on the AHS website said yesterday that Sean Chilton has been named acting AHS president and CEO. If he gets a call about new ICUs, he’ll want to get right on that!

Also on the “executive team,” according to the web page, are:

  • Kerry Bales, Chief Program Officer, Provincial Addiction & Mental Health & Correctional Health Services
  • Gail Fredrickson, Interim Vice President, Community Engagement & Communications
  • Karen Horon, Vice President, Cancer Care Alberta & Clinical Support Services
  • Dr. Peter Jamieson, Interim Associate Medical Director, Clinical Operations
  • Susan McGillivray, Interim Vice President, People & Health Professions
  • Natalie McMurtry, Interim Vice President, Provincial Clinical Excellence
  • Dr. Sid Viner, Vice President & Medical Director, Clinical Operations
  • Ronda White, Chief Audit Executive, Internal Audit & Enterprise Risk Management

Commentators are bound to continue to puzzle over the objectives of the massive changes being brought to the health care system in Alberta, but a significant part of the premier’s motivation is clearly revenge for the role AHS played in the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Throughout the pandemic she was associated with advocacy of quack COVID cures and in her leadership ambitions she had the support of extreme opponents of vaccinations, medical masking, and public health measures generally.

Despite repeated denials by Premier Smith and Health Minister Adriana LaGrange, the restructuring of AHS into four administrative silos also seems clearly designed to accommodate the privatization of large swaths of the public health care system, long advocated by Ms. Smith and her political allies on the extreme right.

As for Dr. Oberg, a physician who held several cabinet posts in the Klein and Stelmach governments and is known for his advocacy of privatized health care and out-of-pocket payments for such basic health services as mammograms and pre-natal ultrasounds, firing a group of senior executives must have seemed eerily familiar.

Alert readers will recall that as “learning minister” in 1999, he fired the entire Calgary Board of Education for alleged dysfunction, after the board split over the divisive shenanigans of a young school trustee named Danielle Smith.

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...