On Monday, Alberta’s former infrastructure minister complained that his 30-day suspension from the United Conservative Party Caucus in the Legislature with its accompanying gag order had lasted 48 days.
Yesterday, Premier Danielle Smith, with the help of her henchpersons in caucus, made it permanent. Caucus voted to banish Mr. Guthrie from the UCP benches and cast him into the parliamentary version of outer darkness – that is, the Legislature’s distant independents’ corner.
Well, the Airdrie-Cochrane MLA is gagged no more! Yesterday afternoon, he rose in the Legislature and said, “Yeah. Mr. Speaker, I would like to table my February 25 resignation letter from cabinet.” Hansard doesn’t record any gasps, but one imagines there may have been a few.
I mean, it was a cabinet document. It was supposed to be a secret. It is no more.
Credit where credit is due, Alberta media has covered this development with unusual alacrity and thoroughness, recounting the allegations in Mr. Guthrie’s resignation letter that Health Minister Adriana LaGrange, and maybe Premier Smith too, “deliberately misled” cabinet about “procurement issues” at Alberta Health Services.
“This deception resulted in the dismissal of the AHS board,” Mr. Guthrie’s resignation letter bluntly stated.
“Procurement issues” in this case sounds like the pressure from individuals connected to the UCP to accept dodgy contracts and other ethically questionable practices alleged in fired Alberta Health Services CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos’s $1.7-million wrongful dismissal lawsuit, which the Smith Government aggressively denies.
The clear implication of Mr. Guthrie’s new allegation is that if cabinet had understood the suspicion something nefarious was afoot was justified, it wouldn’t have fired the board – which, Ms. Mentzelopoulos alleged in her lawyer’s Jan. 20 letter to AHS first reported by The Globe and Mail and in her statement of claim, led to her being fired on January 8, after which her investigations were blocked.
Mentzelopoulos’s claims have not been proven in court, but Guthrie’s now-clarified reason for quitting cabinet certainly seems to offer some credibility to the suggestion something was rotten in the state of Alberta.
Clearly, Guthrie’s impression that cabinet had been hoodwinked was what led to his call in February for LaGrange to “be moved to another unrelated ministry until an investigation is complete.” Premier Smith rejected this out of hand.
In his February 25 letter, Guthrie had asked: “If we can normalize deception in government business practices, what other indiscretions may emerge?” This is a good question. For asking it, Guthrie was put on “probation” the next day, barred from attending caucus meetings and told to keep his mouth shut.
After the resignation letter had been made public yesterday, the premier’s spokesperson, Sam Blackett, insisted that Guthrie was “mistaken” about what happened at the meeting. This seems unlikely.
According to Calgary Herald political columnist Don Braid, until last week Guthrie thought he might be readmitted to the UCP Caucus. To anyone who has been paying attention to the conduct of Smith’s government over the past few months, this seems unrealistic, even naïve, but I guess hope, like outer darkness, is eternal.
“MLA Guthrie has made it clear that he does not support the government’s decision to wait for the investigations of both the Auditor-General and Judge Raymond Wyant to conclude prior to taking further action on the issue of AHS procurement practices and the allegations made by the former AHS CEO,” the UCP Caucus said in an unsigned statement. “It is also clear that he wishes to continue to publicly voice his opposition to the government on that issue.”
Accordingly, the caucus statement snottily concluded, “we wish him well as he continues in his role as MLA for his constituency.”
Politicians in Alberta – Smith notably among them – have recovered from what appeared to be career-ending moves before. Still, it seems likely this will be the beginning of the end of Guthrie’s political career. He will certainly have trouble getting re-elected as an independent candidate should he consider that course of action.
On the other hand, this may free him to speak even more clearly. “That’s why there should be an open, transparent inquiry,” he told Braid in an interview. “Let’s open the books and get to the bottom of this. I think a judicial inquiry would do that.”
That is a fate Smith is determined to avoid.
One wonders also about the impact of this situation on the future of Auditor General Doug Wylie, who had his staff make it clear he does not approve of the government’s scheme to press government employees he contacts to talk to a government lawyer first. Alberta officials who defy the whims of Smith have a way of not remaining in office.
While Guthrie’s fate may serve as a warning to other UCP Caucus members not to be too free about saying what they think if it involves anything less than fulsome support of the premier, she faces some practical limitations on overdoing it.
There are now 46 UCP members of the Legislature, 47 if you count Speaker Nathan Cooper, the MLA for Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills. A few of them are still rumoured to be harbouring feelings of resentment if not resistance to the premier.
Two former MLAs, Guthrie and Lesser Slave Lake MLA Scott Sinclair, now sit as independents. Sinclair, the only First Nations candidate to run for the UCP in 2023, published a social media post on March 1 criticizing the government’s February budget and suggesting he might not vote for it. He was sent into exile less than a week later.
Meanwhile, there are 36 members of the NDP Opposition in the House. And there are two vacant seats – Edmonton-Strathcona and Edmonton-Ellerslie.
NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi is expected to win Strathcona with ease whenever Smith gets around to calling a by-election.
Ellerslie was unwisely abandoned by Rod Loyola to run in the federal election as a Liberal before he was unceremoniously dumped for comments he made in a 2009 video recording. Nevertheless, the NDP has a good chance of holding that riding too, although the UCP will surely make a serious effort to win there to end the Opposition monopoly on Edmonton ridings.
When the dust settles, the UCP will still have a comfortable margin by Parliamentary standards, but not one so comfortable the premier could afford a wholesale purge of rebellious members.
Meanwhile, the NDP is trying to capitalize on LaGrange’s troubles by launching a campaign calling on the premier to fire her.
The Opposition party is obviously counting on the premier not to do that, but they should be careful what they wish for.
After all, at this point, what would they do without her?
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