Finally responding in person to Athana Mentzelopoulos’s $1.7-million wrongful dismissal lawsuit, Premier Danielle Smith stood up at a government news conference in Calgary yesterday and spent part of the tightly controlled half-hour event publicly attacking her former Alberta Health Services (AHS) CEO for the way she did her job before the government fired her on January 8.
I don’t know what Mentzelopoulos or her legal counsel are going to do about the premier’s implication her handpicked AHS chief executive intentionally stood in the way of the government’s efforts to restructure the health care system and failed to inform her political bosses of her concerns about pressure to approve dodgy contracts, but if I were in their shoes I’d be working on a revised statement of claim seeking an increase in damages for the additional harm intentionally done to the plaintiff’s reputation.
As NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi put it, the premier’s news conference was “a master class in gaslighting.”
The premier is still struggling to control the damage caused by the allegation in Mentzelopoulos’s February 12 statement of claim that she was fired for launching an investigation of sketchy procurement deals and contracts with private surgical companies pushed by influential staffers working for the United Conservative Party (UCP), including in the premier’s office.
Smith’s goal from start to finish yesterday was to avoid talking about Mentzelopoulos’s bombshell allegations of interference that, the former CEO said, resulted in higher costs to taxpayers. In this, the premier largely succeeded.
She did so by rambling on about the timelines of the AHS approval process and striving to lend credibility to tendentious claims Mentzelopoulos had not informed Health Minister Adriana LaGrange of her concerns about the contracts in a timely manner, had thrown roadblocks in the way of government policy, and generally acted in a way that justified her dismissal. The premier’s staff helped by cutting off a reporter who persisted with aggressive questions.
Never mind that the proper place to respond to the plaintiff’s allegations in her statement of claim is in a courtroom. The premier’s goal, clearly, was to leave the impression any dodgy contracts were someone else’s fault – maintaining that they originated entirely within AHS – and that her government is determined to get to the bottom of what happened.
But there will be no proper public inquiry into the allegations, Smith made it clear. As a result, there can be no credible resolution to the scandal.
Naturally, there was no promise, let alone a guarantee, that whatever the investigation entirely controlled by her government discovers will be passed on to the public.
Yes, Mentzelopoulos’s allegations and her claim she was fired in “an arbitrary, capricious, callous, high-handed, and bad faith manner” for properly carrying out her duty to investigate high-level interference with overpriced contracts were bound to set off a political storm.
But were it not for the premier’s adoption of the full MAGA strategy of always attacking and denying everything, this could have been handled more diplomatically. The matter is, after all, now before the courts.
During the newser, Smith repeated her claim she had nothing to do with anything beyond general policy decisions. “I was not involved in these procurement decisions. I had nothing to do with the process decisions, or the implementation.”
The courts may eventually have something to say about the aggressive strategy adopted by Alberta’s head of government – assuming a deal is not quietly struck with Mentzelopolous to prevent that from happening.
In the meantime, Smith made it clear, she won’t be firing LaGrange – whatever Infrastructure Minister Peter Guthrie thinks she ought to do.
It is less clear what will happen to Guthrie, but it seems quite possible that he won’t be fired either if the episode can be made to disappear expeditiously down the Memory Hole. There is no evidence, after all, that he leaked his own letter to his cabinet colleagues saying LaGrange should be replaced – not that a lack of evidence is necessarily an impediment to this government’s plans.
Andre Tremblay, the senior civil servant who just days ago the premier declared to be AHS’s everything, everywhere, all at once – official administrator, acting CEO, and deputy minister of health – will be replaced on an interim basis as deputy minister by an associate DM of health, Darren Hedley.
Both the premier and health minister insisted all contracts were strictly an internal AHS matter, and made concerted attacks on Alberta Health Services, channelling Donald Trump and trying to make it sound as if there were a Deep State conspiracy throughout the organization to slow down the government’s plan to privatize surgical services.
“AHS leadership has always shown us resistance, and it is clear that they would rather keep all surgeries in hospitals only operated by Alberta Health Services,” Smith complained at one point. This is unlikely, but if true suggests someone spoke up for the well-understood fact it makes far more sense to run things that way, notwithstanding the cherry-picked statistics the premier trotted out as a comparison of private and public surgical costs.
Please note, dear readers, that an estimate of the true cost of surgeries in public facilities by the respected Canadian Institute of Health Information is not the same thing as a per-operation price bid by a private company for a contract to perform surgeries. The first is likely to have some weight. The latter is an advertising pitch. Both ignore the impact of creaming easy surgeries off to for-profit contractors while dumping complex operations on the public system.
Smith also said she would be setting up a “legal conflicts wall” so that those like LaGrange and Tremblay named in Mentzelopoulos’s statement of claim could continue to stay on the job without being able to interfere in the effort to investigate what actually took place. How this is supposed to work is not clear, and requires pretzel logic to believe.
However, as Nenshi observed in a statement sent to media soon after the premier’s newser ended, “despite all her talk of ‘legal walls’, people will be investigating, and reporting to, their own bosses. Albertans have every right to be deeply suspicious.”
“The premier’s story makes no sense, and she’s clearly trying to hide the truth about alleged government corruption,” Nenshi said. “The premier claims that the minister was trying to get to the bottom of this for eight months, and never told the premier, and that the premier had no idea what her chief of staff was doing. If this is true, both the premier and the minister are incompetent and must go. If she’s lying about it, Albertans deserve a premier who tells the truth.”
It’s important to note that the allegations made in Mentzelopoulos’s statement of claim have not been tested in a court of law. It’s also probably important to note that this point many of the allegations made by Premier Smith in defence of the way her government does business haven’t been tested in a court of law either.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
