After working just one year and 32 days of her four-year contract, Athana Mentzelopoulos is no longer president and CEO of Alberta Health Services.
Did the former Alberta and B.C. senior civil servant jump or was she pushed?
It’s not clear. We’ll likely never get a straight answer from Premier Danielle Smith or anyone else in her United Conservative Party Government, but we might find some clues in what the government had to say yesterday about the latest chaos at the former provincial health authority.
“Acute care is the most complex part of the health care system, and it’s critical that we have the right leadership in place to see this work through and make positive changes to the health care system for Albertans now and into the future,” said Health Minister Adriana LaGrange in a canned quote in the government’s news release. “I want to extend my sincerest gratitude to Athana Mentzelopoulos for the work she has done during her time leading Alberta Health Services.”
“We are at a critical time in the work that is underway to refocus the health care system,” said UCP-appointed AHS board chair Angela Fong in the same release. “I am confident we can continue to make great strides to achieve the goal of making health care better for everyone in Alberta. I want to thank Athana Mentzelopoulos for her hard work, commitment and leadership during her time in the role.”
In a statement emailed to AHS staff, physicians and volunteers shortly before the unexpected announcement was made public, Ms. Fong, a former senior executive at the Crown-owned Alberta Investment Management Corp., also said of Ms. Mentzelopoulos, “as she departs from this role, effective today, I want to thank her for all her work during her time and I want to wish her the very best.”
Because Ms. Mentzelopoulos started work on Dec. 7, 2023, as long as she wasn’t fired for just cause, according to Article 5.3 (e) of her contract she’s now owed her entire base salary of $583,443 for 2025.
Whatever happened, this suggests her departure was not carefully planned. One imagines an effort will be made to have Ms. Mentzelopoulos’s tenure at AHS disappear down the Memory Hole as quickly as possible.
This may be easier to achieve than in the case of her highly respected predecessor, Verna Yiu, who has been active on social media defending the public health care system since she was fired by the previous UCP premier, Jason Kenney, for being too independent minded, too committed to the public health care system, and too serious about public health during the pandemic for the UCP’s taste. Dr. Yiu, who was the longest-serving AHS CEO from 2016 to 2022, is now provost and academic vice-president of the University of Alberta.
But Ms. Mentzelopoulos, who endured controversy in British Columbia as a member of former B.C. premier Christy Clark’s inner circle, kept a low profile throughout her time in Alberta as a senior civil servant and as AHS CEO. She may not wish to find herself back in the spotlight.
Ostensibly, yesterday’s press release was about the appointments of new interim presidents to AHS and the government’s separate new Acute Care Alberta bureaucratic entity.
But reading official Alberta news releases written for the Smith Government is a bit like reading Pravda or Izvestiya in the bad old days of the Soviet Union: The real news is rarely found at the top of the story.
Chris Eagle will run Acute Care Alberta for now, the release said, and Andre Tremblay will “help support Dr. Eagle’s work and … lead AHS through its transition from a regional health authority to a hospital-based service provider.”
Dr. Eagle is a former president and CEO of Alberta Health Services, who was appointed to a five-year term in that role on April Fool’s Day 2011 and quit just over two and a half years later in the fall of 2013.
Yesterday’s press release noted: “This appointment will take effect Feb. 1 to coincide with the establishment of Acute Care Alberta as a legal entity. … His appointment to the position is pending finalization of his contract.” It is odd the government announced his appointment before his contact has been negotiated, since it puts Dr. Eagle in an extremely advantageous negotiating position.
Mr. Tremblay is the Deputy Minister of Alberta Health as the provincial Health Department is confusingly known. As of Sept. 19, he was also a member of the AHS Board.
“Tremblay will work with AHS leadership to oversee operations, support staff transitions to Primary Care Alberta and establish Acute Care Alberta as a legal entity ahead of its operationalization this spring,” said the news release, promising confidently that “Albertans will continue to access acute care services as they always have and there will be no impact to front-line health care workers.”
Seemingly trying to justify the UCP’s creation of new bureaucratic agencies, Ms. LaGrange told an Edmonton Journal reporter that “it became very clear through the modernizing of Alberta’s primary care system that there needed to be dedicated leadership for primary care.” Then she claimed that in the past such work “was being done somewhat off the side of people’s desks.”
Meanwhile, according to the press release, Mr. Tremblay will continue to do his full-time job as the Health Department’s top civil servant while he also does the full-time job of AHS president and CEO. While the release did not explain which side of his desk will be devoted to running AHS, it did say he will receive only his generous civil service salary.
The government-appointed AHS board of directors will now start to look for (another) permanent president and CEO, the release said. Readers should not expect the successful applicant to be dedicated to the idea of preserving public health care.
Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi issued a toughly worded statement on the latest managerial shambles at AHS. “It may be a new year, but the UCP is still following their old playbook: undermining public health care and creating chaos for patients and staff,” he said.
“Danielle Smith and Adriana LaGrange keep attacking acute care by firing CEOs and appointing more insiders instead of fixing the very real problems Albertans are facing,” Mr. Nenshi added, making obvious the Opposition party’s interpretation of Mentzelopoulos’s departure.
“This is now the fourth CEO and the fourth Board Chair the UCP has gone through since 2021,” he observed. “Alberta now has six health care organizations each with their own management layer and the UCP still cannot get it right.”
“Danielle Smith promised to fix health care in 90 days,” he continued. “That was 810 days ago and all we’ve seen is a system on the verge of collapse, more new managers for them to blame, and worse patient outcomes.”
“Smith and LaGrange keep looking for people to blame for this disaster,” he concluded, adding that it’s “time for them to look in the mirror” – a powerfully evocative phrase in Alberta political discourse.
“Albertans will continue to access acute care services as they always have and there will be no impact to front-line health care workers.” We as Albertans will continue to wait 16 or more hours for hallway medicine. The UCP! Fixed it on Dani’s first day! Yah! Right!
If Chris Eagle was a good choice? Why didn’t he replace the best one? Yah! Verna! He’s a typical fail up choice by our fail up UCP!
Chris is a pretty awesome, dedicated doc. He’s a lot smarter than you and I.
Ralph Klein was a disaster for the public healthcare system in Alberta, and we know the lasting harm it caused. The UCP are making things worse. Both wanted private for profit healthcare in Alberta. What a shame.
Exactly! The goal is to destroy the public health system to justify privatization. What a disgrace!
Nine VPs reporting to AHS CEO. How the hell can that work? UCP fails again & again to address & to work to fix real problems. Dani keeps lopping the treetop.
Well, Smith did say the admin costs at AHS were far too high, when they were in fact the lowest of any public healthcare organization in the country. She’s now working to ensure she’s not proven to be a liar… in this instance.
I think Adriana LaGrange’s comment ‘it’s critical that we have the right leadership’ makes it pretty clear she/the UCP did not consider Athana Mentzelopoulos to be the right leader. As well, in section 5.2 of her contract (thanks for the link, DJC) Ms. Mentzelopoulos is required to give three months notice before she resigns, unless the AHS board releases her from that obligation. Given that, I would say it is pretty likely she did not choose to leave because she wanted to pursue other opportunities.
It was announced recently that the government will no longer cover the cost of routine eye exams for children and seniors. I wonder how much money that cutback will save, compared to how much money this government wastes in pursuit of their ideology.
How many kids will not be able to see the white board and fall behind at school or suffer because everything’s blurry? How many seniors will fail drivers tests or get in accidents because of poor sight?
Meanwhile, Smith finds the money to take off to trump’s party Jan 20, bail out oil and gas and play musical chairs with our healthcare. How do we get rid of her now not.later?
Hello DJC and fellow commenters,
Is it possible that Ms Mentzelopoulos disagreed with something the UCP wanted and was let go as a consequence?
As for Jim Prenctice, I find it in explicable that he didn’t seem to realize that politicians make all the decisions on how provincial funds are spent. Individual Albertans don’t have any input or decision making role at all. As soon as I heard his comment, “we all need only look in the mirror” I said, “He just lost the election”.
I actually had some sympathy for Jim Prentice’s “look in the mirror” comment, because he was basically right, though he was the wrong person to be saying it. Albertans want high quality services but are not used to the idea that they have to pay for them somehow, even when oil and gas prices are low. The bottom line is we don’t pay enough taxes (personal income tax at higher incomes, corporate tax, and sales tax). Prentice at least had the courage to scrap the 10 % flat tax and re-establish a progressive tax system with multiple brackets. Too bad his budget made other mistakes like the health care “levy” as well as getting rid of tax deductions on charitable donations. Also too bad he ran such a lacklustre campaign. Alberta might have ended up better off in the long run if his PCs had ended up with fewer seats than the NDP, but a lot more than Wild Rose. Would have been interesting, at any rate.
Rural Alberta voters are are very special… in the special ed way.
What? They gotta wear helmets ‘special’? DF
Good to see Nenshi coming out of the shadows. We need his voice to be heard regularly if we’re going to stop the UCP train wreck.
Yet another disaster concerning Healthcare in Alberta and Canada!
I am very happy I moved away from Alberta
Me too, living in Canada is much better than in Alberta.
Did he drop the Mic after that mirror line? What a scorcher!
They’ve installed call buttons in the hallways now. Looks to me like they really are planning for the future of AB healthcare.
The question is not why we have such horrible politicians, the question is why do Albertans INSIST on electing horrible politicians time after time. The ex CEO is fortunate that she is living in Canada. If she worked in another country she could have easily fallen out of a window.
Athana gets turfed just in time to help her best buddy Christy Clark run for PM. Coincidence? I think not.
Taosman: I admit I wondered about that. Puts a whole new spin on the phrase, “Always the bridesmaid.” DJC
With the UCP splitting up Alberta Health Services, it is going to become even more difficult to keep up with their ever changing and shuffling leadership. While this is like shuffling the deck chairs, it is probably the UCPs intention to give the appearance of a lot action while not being to clear about what is really happening, in the hopes enough people will believe this action may improve things.
But at some point Albertans may start to notice that all this frantic activity is not really improving things and fairly soon Smith will no longer to blame the outgoing PM for all our problems.
Also, as our outgoing PM can likely attest, things seem to be going fine until suddenly they aren’t. Unresolved problems pile up and after 5 or 6 years or so a party in power can no longer blame their predecessors either. How long has the UCP been in power in Alberta?
Sounds like an article written by the NDP. The bureaucracy in AHS is eating up far too much money. We have the second most expensive, highly funded health services in Canada, and yet they are incompetent. Obviously. We need far less bureaucrats and with that money saved it can go to front line workers. And we need to dispose of the Colleges of physicians and surgeons, it’s not a board of doctors, it’s all lawyers. Lawyers that threaten doctors and their families with suspensions if they speak out.
Jeanne: Well, it’s not written by the NDP, although the author (that would be me) believes the objective evidence indicates the NDP was clearly a more competent health care manager than the UCP. Since CIHI has estimated (granted, some time ago now) that AHS managerial costs are lower than the national average, your statement that “the bureaucracy” at AHS is eating up too much money is suspect. One reason for higher costs in Alberta is the massive and unneeded restructuring of health care being conducted by the UCP. Calling health care managers “bureaucrats” doesn’t change the fact that no health care system can operate without managers. Your point about the colleges is dangerous MAGA claptrap. Letting bureaucrats and beancounters manage physicians’ practices, which is exactly what you are proposing, would have deadly consequences. DJC
How does splitting one health care system into god knows how many different agencies and providers reduce the amount of bureaucracy at all ? They are literally creating NEW bureaucracies out of whole cloth !
As far as cuts go, once you cut something, it is very difficult to get it back ? Close a department it will be hard to reopen it later, the money isn’t going to magically re-appear. Stave off building a few hospitals ? The province is still growing and that care capacity is still needed.
Health care In Canada is patchy enough (should be expanded, massively, this is FEDERAL funding, and all parties have been guilty of this)but alberta doing its best to chase the worst healthcare system in the entire g7 (costs the most, has the worst outcomes, medical debt is the most common form of bankruptcy) certainly isn’t going to make anything better.
The point isn’t to improve anything, it’s to create chaos, and privatize around the edges of our public system, daring Ottawa to withhold healthcare funds every time they do it.
You want American health care, go live in America. The goddamn monthly cost of your insurance will burn your eyebrows off maybe even before the wildfires do. Hopefully your co pay is low enough you can keep your house, if you’re lucky enough to live in a state where you can still insure it.
Finally, healthcare isn’t a partisan issue, relying on such to try and make your point reveals with the clarity of a clanging gong that you DO NOT HAVE A POINT TO MAKE, you’re just trying (and failing) to do a partisan attack. Use a little imagination next time.
While there are some independent clever medicals, there are only silly ones engaged by medical authorities. None has calculated the average number of chronic conditions in a comparative group of alive ones with the same age-structure like of “official Covid-19 victims”.
Data concerning Covid-19-mortality are heavily inflated, because:
-the av. number of conditions must be strongly increased amongst true Covid-19 victims
-any very high average age of Covid-19 decedents is impossible.
It is proven by two independent math-logic methods; the second one is pasted as Shortened Supplement -its summary.
https://zenodo.org/record/8312871
Joan: This strikes me as pish-posh, but I’ll leave it to my more qualified readers to respond if they feel like it. It’s not on topic, so beyond a little debunking I won’t entertain a long conversation about COVID conspiracy theories under this story. DJC
Sentence number two should be put down on syntax alone but the idea that “none” have looked into comorbidities of those folks who died during the pandemic is ridiculous on its face, it’s been five years; that’s long enough for someone to do their entire post doc just studying that and I guarantee you there’s a LOT of folks working on it. Aside from logic, (I know a stretch for some folks) it’s something they were looking at from the beginning, you know when thousands and thousands of people started dying; and no one had any idea why. But the whole premise of it is ridiculous, how many of us will have one single issue unrelated to anything else that will be our demise ? Or is it maybe the stacking of those comorbidities , and our old friend time that does the job ?
I am not a doctor, but the answer seems obvious. Am I sick of people trying to make this point like it’s a smart one ? Yes.
Pish posh is about six letters more than I would have used Mr Climenhaga, you are being kind. Honestly, I couldn’t make sense of a single thought in the word salad she has posted.