Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach has spoken: there will be no judicial inquiry into accusations of intimidation, hush money and hanky-panky in health care.
His intemperate and weirdly timed response late Sunday only lends credibility to the accusations levelled Friday by Independent Edmonton-Meadowlark MLA Raj Sherman and all four opposition leaders at a history-making news conference.
“Let’s get back to reality. We have listened. We have taken action,” said the premier in a harsh statement slipped onto the government’s website Sunday evening, when no journalists or citizens were around to ask him the obvious questions in the halls of the Legislature.
Alas, the unorthodox action taken by the premier will do very little sooth the growing fears of Albertans that something is deeply awry in the health care system. Inevitably, voters are going to wonder, “What’s he got to hide? Who is he protecting?”
This provides some insight into why the four leaders of parties with seats in the Legislature were prepared to take the chance of climbing up on a stage together and demanding a judicial inquiry into Sherman’s recent allegations that physicians were pushed around, punished and paid off to shut them up when they complained about people dying while waiting for surgery.
One would have thought an inquiry would work better for the government than the opposition parties. After all, Danielle Smith of the right-wing Wildrose Alliance, Sue Huff of the Alberta Party and David Swann of the Liberals, both pretty much in the centre, and Brian Mason of the faintly leftish NDP can hardly be called natural political allies.
Remember, judicial inquiries take ages to examine witnesses, write their reports and finally give the public something to chew on. While they are taking forever, the government and all the candidates for the leadership of the Conservative party would be quite justified in saying they really couldn’t comment on something that was before a judge.
Indeed, if the planets had all aligned correctly for the Conservatives, they could have been back in power with a new premier and a nice comfortable majority before the inquiry was even finished lining up interviews with witnesses. That’s why governments in trouble like inquiries so much.
The premier’s refusal to even countenance such a thought inevitably leads to the suspicion — justified or not — that the government must have something to hide.
It also suggests strongly that the opposition leaders were all pretty confident when they agreed to their unprecedented joint appearance that, ipso facto, the government would never agree.
At any rate, there are now enough verifiable facts swirling among the innuendoes and unsupported allegations that the opposition leaders are quite justified — the premier’s chippy dismissal notwithstanding — to demand an impartial judicial inquiry.
Despite the high cost to taxpayers of such an independent inquiry, how else are Albertans supposed to have confidence in their medical system without one to clear the air? Otherwise, we’ll never get over the feeling there are a whole closet full of other shoes waiting to drop!
Certainly the review by the Health Quality Council of Alberta announced by Stelmach and defended in his statement Sunday is no longer going to satisfy Albertans’ growing concerns.
Sherman was described as the most popular politician in Alberta last fall after Premier Stelmach fired him from his job as Parliamentary Assistant for Health and kicked him out of the Tory caucus for criticizing the government’s health policy. Many Albertans were deeply offended at reports some Conservative insiders questioned his sanity.
And Sherman nearly brought down the House the week before last when he told the Legislature that an unspecified number of physicians had been paid “millions” by the old Capital Health Region to keep quiet about the deaths of patients awaiting surgical treatment.
But he appeared to lose most of his credibility when he turned up in the Legislature last week with reams of emails, but none that came close to proving his claims.
The tables turned again, however, when the CBC revealed the details of a now-settled $450,000 lawsuit by a Harvard surgeon who once worked for the CHR alleging he was intimidated, denied the right to practice and described as mentally unstable. That case has since been settled out of court and the financial details are sealed.
As NDP Leader Mason told Friday’s presser, the cases are “eerily similar” and the parallels “are overwhelming.”
Whatever is going on, Stelmach’s latest move will do nothing at all to calm things down. For his part, Sherman appears to have more political lives than the proverbial cat!
This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.
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