The Alberta Government’s frenetic and seemingly panicky scramble to cover up leaks about the continuing dodgy health care contracts scandal is taking on a distinct Watergate vibe.
Watergate, of course, is the name of the hotel and office complex in Washington D.C. where an interrupted break-in by Republican Party operatives 1972 led to the scandal dubbed Watergate that would bring down U.S. president Richard M. Nixon by the summer of 1974.
That the Watergate coverup was worse than Mr. Nixon’s crimes may not be true, but that notion has become political folk wisdom on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border.
On Thursday, news broke of an email sent to thousands of Alberta Health Services staff members and employees of the provincial Health Department by Senior Assistant Deputy Minister of Health Leann Wagner, directing any of them contacted for an interview by the Office of the Auditor General to “please redirect the OAG to our legal counsel Rose LLP.”
“This should be done by email with a copy to me to (sic) and our legal counsel Matt Lindsey* at Rose LLP,” Ms. Wagner wrote in the email, which was soon leaked to the Opposition NDP. The email even included a template for a reply politely telling the auditor general to get lost.
NDP Justice Critic Irfan Sabir sent a copy of the email to media with a statement calling it “a gag order on public servants, plain and simple.”
The text certainly appeared to contradict Premier Danielle Smith’s glib claim in early February, in the aftermath of the bombshell allegation by former AHS CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos that she had been fired for launching an investigation of sketchy procurement deals and private surgical contracts pushed by influential staffers in Ms. Smith’s government and office. “We need to get to the bottom of this issue quickly to identify any potential wrongdoing, correct it, and address it appropriately,” Ms. Smith said at the time.
Within hours of Mr. Sabir’s revelation of the existence of the email, a statement made by the office of Health Minister Adriana LaGrange said “this is not about impeding the investigation,” and further claimed that it is standard operating procedure for public employees in Alberta “either have legal counsel present, or ministry senior staff present when participating in interviews.”
The Office of the Auditor General, however, quickly issued a sharp denial, saying it is not normal for lawyers to accompany public employees to interviews with its staff and, what’s more, nor is it true as was suggested by the minister’s office that Mr. Wylie was aware of the plan.
“We were not aware of, nor did we endorse, that proposed action,” a spokesperson for Mr. Wylie’s office told The Canadian Press yesterday. “This is not a standard practice our office typically encounters in the course of its work.”
“We want Albertans to understand that the auditor general will do everything necessary within his powers to ensure he has access to the information and the individuals required for his work,” CP quoted Cheryl Schneider saying.
It is worth noting that although the auditor general is appointed by the Legislature, now dominated by the United Conservative Party, his powers are considerable. Section 14 of the Auditor General Act states that present or former public employees, among many others, “shall give to the Auditor General any information, records or explanations that the Auditor General considers necessary to enable the Auditor General to exercise or perform the Auditor General’s powers and duties under this or any other Act.”
In a tweet late yesterday, former NDP justice minister Kathleen Ganley commented tartly on the back and forth between the minister’s and the auditor general’s offices: “So basically the UCP lied to cover up their cover up.”
Meanwhile, also yesterday, lawyers for the Alberta Government were in court trying to get an injunction to prevent Ms. Mentzelopoulos from sharing any information from confidential AHS documents the government claims she improperly forwarded to herself by email.
A government lawyer told Court of King’s Bench Justice Debra Yungwirth the government also wants to cross-examine Ms. Mentzelopoulos in an effort to find out who she may have told about the confidential contents of the emails – an effort the former CEO’s legal counsel described as a “fishing expedition” to suss out what his client has told the auditor general.
“They’re trying to get a back door into what that investigation is about as well as what the RCMP investigation is about,” lawyer Dan Scott told the court, the CBC reported.
Ms. Mentzelopoulos is suing the provincial government for wrongful dismissal, seeking the $1.7 million she would have been paid had she been able to complete her four-year contract as AHS CEO.
Although she was handpicked by the government to lead AHS and was pushed hard to take the job, the government now claims she was an ineffective leader who ignored its instructions on how to break up AHS. The government has taken an extremely aggressive approach to her lawsuit, filing unusually colourful legal documents with the court that are soon reported by journalists.
During yesterday’s hearing, a government lawyer accused Ms. Mentzelopoulos of acting like U.S. President Donald J. Trump for forwarding emails to herself.
Justice Yungwirth has reserved judgment on the government’s request.
Given the restrictions that the government appears to be trying to place on Mr. Wylie’s investigation and the limited terms of reference of the separate investigation into AHS procurement practices by retired Manitoba Provincial Court judge Raymond E. Wyant, who does not have the power to compel testimony, the NDP continues to press for a full judicial inquiry led by a judge.
For obvious reasons, that is unlikely to happen.
*Matthew R. Lindsay K.C. is a partner at Rose LLP. His name, misspelled in the email, is spelled as shown in this note.
Lagrange blatantly lied. Surprise, surprise.
Danielle Smith is a wannabe dictator. She is quietly taking pages straight from Trump’s playbook. She implemented anti-trans policies targeting youth before Trump was re-elected . This proves she’s not just copying the U.S., She’s leading the charge in Canada.
Albertans clearly voted no to a provincial police force. What did she do? Ignored them and pushed it through anyway. That’s not leadership. It’s authoritarianism. She governs by threat. If municipalities don’t fall in line with her agenda, they’re punished with withheld funding. (See Calgary Green line project) That’s not democracy. That’s coercion.
She’s dismantling public healthcare. She’s cozying up to extremist groups. She’s muzzling watchdogs and turning Alberta into a testing ground for Project 2025-style governance. The public never voted for this. She’s silencing dissent and steamrolling over democratic norms. Because she knows if she asked for consent, she’d never get it.
This isn’t just bad policy. It’s dangerous, especially for marginalized communities. And if we don’t call it out now, it’ll only get worse and the damage she is causing is irreversible.
On the bright side, though, she does seem to be more effective at getting people to vote Liberal in the upcoming federal election than some of the Liberal Party’s campaign strategies.
I agree with everything you said except for the part where we did not sign up for this. Smith has been telling us for a decade how she wants things to be run. This is exactly what the public voted for. Yes, I know we all did not all vote for her but forty percent of the voting population did not bother to get off the couch to vote.
Canadians in their wisdom have elected Bill Vander Zalm, Scott Moe, Brad Wall, Mike Harris, Rob Ford, Doug Ford, Ralph Klein, Jason Kenney, Stephen Harper, Brian Mulroney and Heather Stefanson, among other gems. This is who were are.
Murphy: Let’s not forget Bob McClelland, minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources in the Bill Bennett Government, and a man I had the misfortune to work for and regularly meet. Mr. McClelland, now in his 93rd year, is remembered for what has come to be known as “The Top Hat Affair.” A description is found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_McClelland DJC
Yikes, LaGrange actually lying about the Auditor General? The one doing the investigating? Is she nuts? It will be pretty apparent to him now that Mentzelopolous’ claims are correct.
So what’s next? Smith calls a public inquiry? NEVER.
Smith finally throws LaGrange under the bus? Maybe.
Smith fires the Auditor General? Probably.
The scandal must be way worse than what we think. It has to bring down this government.
Betts: This is much worse than people realize. If the UCP fires Doug Wylie, it will make the UCP look really bad.
The UCP already looks bad. This will make it look worse.
Yes, the AHS scandal is not going away, although the UCP has had some reprieve due to other news and events. The problem is they have really not satisfactorily answered the questions and concerns about this, and their approach to dealing with this makes it seem like they have something to hide.
I am not sure if the cover up is worse and hopefully the UCP will not follow Nixon’s Watergate example and try to fire the Auditor General, but trying to restrict his work already is bad enough. There must also be something in the former AHS CEO’s emails that concerns or looks bad for them if they are trying to suppress them too.
In any event, it usually takes these things a while to play out and obstruction does not help make it go faster. One danger for the UCP, is it would be better for this to end quickly and not drag on until close to the next election. For instance, the Duffy Senate housing payment scandal was dragged out and then became an big issue in the 2015 election for the Federal Conservatives. It wasn’t the only factor, after a decade or so, voters were getting tired of them anyways. By then the UCP will have been in power for two terms and there are a lot of other problems accumulating.
Now that the RCMP are apparently involved, I believe an army of Albertans will agree with me when I suggest we should expect a “we aren’t quite sure what happened” verdict from the RCMP in five years or so. Any other jurisdiction, heads would roll. No doubt Smith is doing her best Alfred E. Neuman, “What, Me Worry?”.
Jaundiced Eye: Not this time. This won’t have the same outcome as the last time with the VPN premier. There is alot more to this than people realize.
The closest thing I remember that was similar to this was the West Edmonton lawsuit, involving Ralph Klein and others. This is worse, and very detrimental to the UCP’s survival as a political party. By the looks of this, it covers far more than what is revealed in the conventional media.
If nothing else comes of it–the NDP and Libs should harp on this at every possible political opportunity.
Right up there with PP’s refusal to get security clearance.
CBC ran a story about this yesterday as well. In it, a spokesperson from LaGrange’s office mentions how they have shared 13,000 documents with the auditor general’s office. The idea is referenced as an example of how transparent they are being, but to me it sounds like they are using a document dump, by hiding the incriminating documents in a myriad of irrelevant ones, and hoping the auditor general’s office’s staff will not have the resources to find the good stuff.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-government-auditor-general-investigation-ahs-mentzelopoulos-1.7509049
Maybe someone could just “accidentally” dump them on wikileaks…then the politico internet investigators and investigative reporters will have a field day sorting through them for free.
Save a lot of time and money 😉
In true ideologically consistent authoritarian partisan and anti-democratic fashion, by concentrating power, controlling information, limiting the independence of policy-making, regulatory, and watchdog bodies:
“The government’s message is clear: if you advocate or resist, you will be fired, and they will use every tool at their disposal to grind you down.”
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/opinion-one-inquiry-to-rule-them-all-separate-probes-into-alberta-health-decisions-limit-transparency/ar-AA1CN9IB
It would be surprising if it were not the case that there are prominent individuals and sectors of society, both inside and outside of Canada (For example, Stephen Harper is the Chairman of an organization that promotes authoritarianism.), that enthusiastically endorse, promote, and finance these recent developments.
International Democratic Union
via Press Progress
From Feb. 2024 regarding the loss of life in B.C.
https://pressprogress.ca/stephen-harpers-global-alliance-of-conservative-parties-quietly-scrubbed-india-off-its-website/
Just who is Mr. Lindsey’s client – the premier, the government, the AHS employee, all of the above? If the client is the premier or the minister, then confidentiality is owed to them, not necessarily the employees. Disclosure by an employee to the lawyer could be shared with the government and what then is the likely fate of the employee who comes clean? Clarity is needed.
While politicians were jailed in Saskatchewan for being criminals you can bet it will never happen in Alberta. Lawyers have told me over the years that Klein made certain all judges were Conservative Supporters and I bet nothing has changed.
Daffy Danni and the gang surely can’t have believed they could keep a letter like that confidential. Laughter.
Are you – DJC – moving to SubStack? Just curious.
Lefty: Not now. Probably not ever. Nevertheless, I have started a Substack account and will be cross posting these blog posts there. There are several reasons: Readership has plateaued on this platform and I am looking for a way to increase both readership and revenues. Google advertising revenue, always small, has declined. Many readers have been asking for an emailed newsletter, a functionality that WordPress and like services have added fees to access, making them expensive and unwieldy to operate. SubStack makes that part easy. Over the long term, it’s hard to say what will happen. The Internet evolves – too quickly for my taste. I remain committed to making my posts easy to access and free for readers. For now, posts will appear here first. I will review the comments for corrections by readers in the morning, then post to SubStack. Ideally, this will work out like two Tim Hortons shops selling lousy coffee at adjacent locations – the revenue at both will go up. There definitely won’t be as many photos on SubStack. DJC
Thank you, DJC. Your fellow blogger named Dave went to Substack, and I didn’t like it. It wasn’t the subscription fee that turned me off; it was the lack of dialogue in the comments section that did it.
I get as much out of the comments as I do from your posts, and before the other Dave went that way, the comments on his blog were just as valuable. On his Substack, there are very few comments and virtually no back and forth between commenters, which is just boring and not worth the price of admission. So I unsubscribed. I still enjoy his writing, and still read his public-facing posts, but I was disappointed by the experience of being a paid subscriber.
I’m glad you’re not going in that direction.
I’m with Jerry on this. I really enjoy your articles and your commenters (even ones I disagree with are often witty) and substack well–it kind of overwhelms me.
I just stumbled onto here and I’m not even Albertan and it’s been interesting, enlightening, and entertaining.
Thanks, B. I’m inclined to think the way forward is to cross-post the blog on both this site and Substack. DJC
Thanks for providing the link to Don Braid’s column, David. As I read Mr. Braid’s direct quote from Adrianna LaGrange’s office, the mental image of Ms. LaGrange saying those exact words became vividly clear, because we have heard her say things like that in the past.
A few years ago, when Ms. LaGrange was education minister, she told a press conference how Alberta teachers were indoctrinating students against the oil sands, as was evidenced by a teacher’s test questions where the right answers were ‘Oil sands development means destruction of tracts of forest’ and ‘Oil sands development should have more restrictions on it’. It was really entertaining watching her squirm when reporters asked her for more details, which she did not want to give.
It turned out that the answers were to questions that tested Grade 10 students’ ability to read an article about the oil sands for context. That little detail, however, really didn’t fit the UCP narrative.
https://www.thestar.com/calgary/alberta-s-education-minister-slammed-test-questions-about-the-oilsands-but-educators-gave-them-a/article_296003f9-eeab-5fe2-92ea-ccd6a0548991.html
I remember another time, during Covid, when Ms. LaGrange announced a policy that sounded a bit hinky, but very much in line with UCP ideology. As if sensing the press audience’s skepticism, she added, “It was recommended by Dr. Hinshaw.” Since Dr. Hinshaw’s communication to cabinet were confidential, LaGrange was free to make such claims without fear of contradiction. It worked then, so it makes sense that LaGrange would try it again with the auditor general’s office, before discovering she couldn’t get away with it.
The bottom line is that, unlike her mentor, the woman has no skills as a liar.
“Clandestinism is not the usage of a handful of
rogues, it is a formalized practice of an entire
class in which a thousand hands spontaneously
join. Conspiracy is the normal continuation of
normal politics by normal means.”
—Carl Oglesby
Thank you DC, this is getting more interesting! LaGrange’s explanation doesn’t hold water for another reason. According to the CBC, “A spokesperson from LaGrange’s office later told CBC News in an email that public servants having a lawyer, or ministry senior staff, present during interviews with the office of the auditor general is ‘standard practice,’ because it ensures procedural fairness and helps staffers understand ‘their rights, obligations, and the scope of their participation in the investigation.’ There is no way that the Department’s outside lawyer would receive – or accept – those instructions. The Department’s lawyer has one client: the Department. There is no way they would be offering legal advice to employees about their rights. That would be a clear conflict of interest.
Simon: Tom Engel tweeted much the same thing yesterday. I am sure I’ll be following up on this. DJC
The big question is are Albertans going to help us once proud conservative supporters stop this Reform Party insanity or are they going to let the lunatics win and continue to treat us like morons while they show our doctors, nurses, teachers and students no respect and deliberately destroy our children and grandchildren’s future with the massive debts they are creating? While Pierre Poilievre and his pal Donald Trump continue to praise the convoy trucker criminals Ottawa citizens tell us about the nightmare they went through with young children terrified with the constant horns blaring while Poilievre didn’t care and took them donuts and coffee. That’s how smart this fool is.
While Danielle Smith tries to hide out in the U.S. she continues her hang out with her Right Wing Extremist friends. I spent last week in B.C. visiting relatives who were once proud Alberta Conservatives like us and they were shocked when I showed them how this idiot Smith compared us to Nazis for daring to get vaccinated, yet we know the vaccine saved 10 of us seniors who got COVID after four shots and all the mindless seniors who refused to get them are dead.
There is no question that these Reformers are hellbent on privatizing our healthcare and education systems and these mindless seniors supporting them could be in a lot of trouble.
I am quite sure smith and her cronies are hiding something. They obviously overpaid some companies for doing nothing. She should also be investigated for buying millions of dollars worth of useless children aspirin which we are still paying to store. She is our version of trump as you can tell by how many times she has to go to the states.
So: Watergate. You and I are both of an age where we both recall that entire affair from our youth, having lived through it as it happened. I agree with you that the “folk wisdom” of the coverup being worse than the crime itself probably doesn’t hold water when you take into account the entirety of Richard Nixon’s malfeasance, but I think the adage is more confined to what was known about the “4th-rate burglary” of the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex at the time it happened. It certainly does apply to other political scandals that have occurred since then, including those that have been appellated as “-gates” by the press.
So, is the “dodgy contracts” affair a “- gate”? Does this apparent coverup rise to the level of a “-gate” that will bring down a prominent politician? Remember, it took two years for Watergate to fell “Tricky Dicky” from office. This affair is not yet six months old.
As others have said here, “mo’ popcorn”.
The only reason for having a Government lawyer present during the interview is so the lawyer can take detailed notes so if the employee should say something they can be fired and the lawyer will have the details so the employee cannot claim wrongful dismissal. The unwritten part of this to employees is: do not say anything harmful or you will be fired. Remember nothing to see here!