As if to reinforce his role as the proverbial bad penny of Alberta politics, Raj Sherman has turned up again – this time as Premier Danielle Smith’s man at the head of the Health Quality Council of Alberta.
Actually, Dr. Sherman has been back for a while – since June, anyway, when according to his potted biography on the HQCA website, he was appointed to a three-year term as chair of the provincial agency’s board of directors without the benefit of a public announcement or a news story.
One hardly knows whether to gasp or laugh out loud!
Dr. Sherman’s new official biography describes some of the highlights of his career – former MLA, Emergency Room physician, one-time president of the Alberta Medical Association’s Emergency Medicine Section, and leader of an unnamed Opposition political party.
But it glosses over the lowlights, most notably Dr. Sherman’s apparent ability to act as political kryptonite for any political party with which he is associated.
He is widely credited, with some justice, for single-handedly destroying the Alberta Liberal Party, which he led from 2011 to 2015.
After Dr. Sherman’s apparent conversion to the premier’s views on how to “reform” health care in the lead-up to the last provincial election, in which he ran as a United Conservative Party candidate in the Edmonton-Whitemud riding where he was crushed by NDP MLA Rakhi Pancholi, perhaps Ms. Smith concluded history was unlikely to repeat itself in the case of the UCP.
Or maybe she decided her Teflon-like ability to slough off political disasters would apply to any that Dr. Sherman perpetrated, or perhaps that the good doctor’s personal kryptonite could be directed at Alberta Health Services, which she clearly intends to destroy.
Since Albertans weren’t told of Dr. Sherman’s appointment to the HQCA – which is charged with improving patient safety and the quality of health care – no one has really had a chance to ask him how he proposes to carry out that mandate.
Alert readers will recall that this is similar to the way we learned in June that former health minister Tyler Shandro had been appointed to the board of Covenant Health.
When Dr. Sherman turned up as the UCP candidate in Edmonton-Whitemud, the UCP didn’t seem too enthusiastic about him. But when they let him run for the nomination, he beat the party staffer who appeared to be the favoured candidate. Anyway, they were presumably confident he would be brushed aside by Ms. Pancholi, who is now NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi’s deputy leader.
In the leadup to the 2023 election, Dr. Sherman drove around in a Liberal Red Dodge Ram pickup truck with a colourful advertising wrap. He’d purchased the wrap – a weird counterpoint to former premier Jason Kenney’s Tory Blue Dodge Ram pickup – in hopes of running to replace Mr. Kenney.
That time the UCP wisely said no, diplomatically telling Dr. Sherman that he didn’t quite meet their requirements to seek the party’s top job, which thanks to the UCP’s majority in the Legislature came with the keys to the Premier’s Office.
Dr. Sherman is by all accounts a highly competent Emergency Room physician and a decent human being, but his political career exemplifies the journalistic cliche “a trail of devastation.”
Elected in 2008 in the riding of Edmonton-Meadowlark, he appeared to have a promising career in the Progressive Conservative Party. Well-spoken and respected for his medical work, he was named by Premier Ed Stelmach as Parliamentary Secretary to the minister of health and wellness, Ron Liepert.
But within two years, Dr. Sherman was starting to show the erratic tendencies that would be the hallmark of his political life.
In 2010, he gave premier Stelmach little choice but to fire him after he penned a rambling and sometimes incoherent email attacking his own party’s failure to reduce Emergency Room wait times and emailed it late one night to practically everyone.
Given the boot by Stelmach, Dr. Sherman followed up with a media interview attacking then Alberta Health Services Board chair Ken Hughes and Liepert.
In 2011, Dr. Sherman took a notion to run for the leadership of the Alberta Liberal Party, whose leader David Swann wanted to retire.
The Liberals had two excellent candidates for the job, capable MLAs Laurie Blakeman and Hugh Macdonald. However, the party foolishly decided to allow anybody to vote for their new leader, including non-members. So on September 10, 2011, Dr. Sherman won the Liberal leadership on the first ballot and became leader of the Opposition.
He was a disaster, partly because he believed he had all the answers – especially when it came to the problems of health care. For a spell, he managed to persuade quite a few Albertans that was so.
At one point Dr. Sherman tried to change the party’s name to the Liberalberta Party. That didn’t work out either, for reasons that are probably obvious.
In the 2012 provincial election, Alison Redford’s PCs formed a majority government with 61 seats. The Liberals – not long before a credible Opposition party – managed to win only five with Dr. Sherman at the helm. Still, that surprise kept the party’s heart pumping for another three years.
He quickly earned a reputation as a party leader who made startling revelations and strident claims about the conduct of the government and the health care system, then couldn’t back them up. His performance in the 2013 preferential health care inquiry was embarrassing.
His accusations, which contributed to the inquiry being called, amounted to very little, with retired judge John Z. Vertes concluding there were only a few minor incidents of patients receiving preferential access to care.
For that matter, Dr. Sherman didn’t seem all that interested in leading his party, which was described at the time as a group of independents who shared office space.
In January 2015, not long before the election that brought the NDP to power, Dr. Sherman decided to pull the plug on the Liberals, abruptly quitting as leader and saying he wouldn’t run again as an MLA.
On May 5, 2015, the NDP won a majority government in a general election. The Liberals elected only one MLA, an outcome for which Dr. Sherman surely deserves most of the credit. Dr. Swann, the only Liberal still standing, was pressed back into service as interim leader.
In the 2019, when Dr. Swann didn’t seek re-election, the Liberals failed to elect a single MLA.
Now Dr. Sherman is going to help Premier Smith save health care.
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