Fired Alberta Health Services (AHS) Chief Executive Officer Athana Mentzelopoulos’s lawyers have filed her $1.7-million lawsuit alleging she was fired “capriciously, arbitrarily, and in bad faith because she was actually carrying out her duties for AHS” and now the stuff is really starting to hit the fan.
Some of Mentzelopoulos’s accusations are incendiary. She names names. And soon after her statement of claim was filed with the Court of King’s Bench early yesterday afternoon, it was in the hands of every major news organization in Alberta.
It’s very hard to see how Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP) can distract Albertans from the Dodgy Contracts Scandal now.
The Globe and Mail, the first media outfit to report Mentzelopoulos’s allegations that government officials close to the UCP were interfering with AHS procurement and contracting decisions on behalf private companies, is no longer the only news organization with the documentation needed to file a comprehensive report.
In addition to the Globe, The Canadian Press, the CBC and Postmedia all filed stories filled with significant allegations made in the statement of claim.
Among Mentzelopoulos’s most startling allegations, pulled from reports by the news media organizations noted above:
- She was warned by an AHS board member to “be very careful” and told she should be concerned about her safety “given some of the people potentially involved behind the scenes.”
- She was warned by Alberta Government Protective Services that some companies involved “would likely apply political pressure to have her terminated from AHS if she threatened their financial interests.”
- Government officials tried to get higher prices paid to private suppliers, both in excess of the prices paid to other private suppliers and internal AHS cost estimates.
- Alberta Surgical Group, a private Edmonton surgical clinic with its contract up for renewal, was expected to exceed its contract by almost $3.5 million in billings but wasn’t performing as many surgeries as required by its deal with AHS.
- Despite Mentzelopoulos’s concerns, Health Minister Adriana LaGrange issued a minister’s directive that took away AHS’s power to negotiate private surgery contracts, and set out rates for surgical clinics that were higher than in comparable contracts.
- After Mentzelopoulos was ordered to end her investigations into MHCare and private surgery clinics, “LaGrange met with the AHS board and demanded the directors fire the CEO.”
- When the Board refused, she was fired the next day by Andre Tremblay, the top civil servant in the Health Department, who was named interim CEO and Official Administrator of AHS after the board too was dismissed.
- That Marshall Smith, then the premier’s chief of staff, warned her that the folks running two surgical centres she was concerned about were “serious people – don’t mess with them.”
- In November, at a meeting about her internal investigations, LaGrange ordered her to “wind it up.”
There’s plenty more, and historians will no doubt one day be poring over the document, but this gives a sense of what’s now hitting the fan. Some of these allegations make health care procurement and contracting in Alberta in 2025 sound like something out of Chicago in 1925!
Of course, it’s important to remember that these are allegations made in a statement of claim. They haven’t been tested or proved in a court of law.
Moreover, when contacted by reporters, both LaGrange and Smith disputed the allegations made about them in Mentzelopoulos’s claim, and said they will soon file statements of defence.
Of course, Premier Danielle Smith – still in Washington D.C. supposedly focusing on U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff shakedown of Canada – will try to ensure there is never a real judge-led public inquiry into the truth of the allegations.
But that will be much harder to do now that so many explosive claims have been reported for all to see.
Shortly before the statement of claim was filed, Alberta NDP Deputy Leader Rakhi Pancholi and Health Critic Sarah Hoffman demanded that the premier reconvene the Legislature immediately so the issue can be addressed in public. “These allegations of corruption are unlike anything this province has ever seen.”
That’s unlikely to happen, but the next sitting of the Legislature is scheduled to take place on the afternoon of February 25. One imagines it’ll be pretty feisty.
Yes, this Dodgy Contracts Scandal has legs – we could very well still be reading about it in 2026.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
