One doesn’t need to work very hard to read between the lines of Alberta Auditor General Doug Wylie’s filing Tuesday to the Alberta Court of Appeal, which argued that the court should deny the Alberta government the right to cross-examine former Alberta Health Services CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos about what records and other information she has given to his office.
It certainly strongly suggests that Mr. Wylie, who has been Alberta’s auditor general since 2018, basically agrees with Ms. Mentzelopoulos’s lawyer that the government was on a “fishing expedition” in mid-April when it when it sought the court’s permission to cross-examine her about what she had given the AG, claiming it needed to know if she had revealed confidential information.
In April, the government’s lawyers got a court to order Ms. Mentzelopoulos to answer questions about the documents she had in her possession when she was fired, and got an injunction requiring her not to share 11 emails she had forwarded to herself shortly before she was fired on Jan. 8.
Ms. Mentzelopoulos is suing AHS for wrongful dismissal in what has come to be known as the Corrupt Care Scandal. She alleges in her $1.7-million lawsuit that AHS was pressured by senior government officials to sign off on dodgy contracts that were not in the agency’s interest and that she was fired when she tried to investigate.
The controversy set off by her original allegations has continued at a boil ever since, thanks in large part to a series of revelations published in the pages of The Globe and Mail that point to some of the ways the government may have been influenced and the fact Ms. Mentzelopoulos is being sued in turn for defamation by Premier Danielle Smith’s former chief of staff.
The United Conservative Party Government has been trying hard to make the story go away, without success. It has become, in other words, a goat rodeo.
Now Mr. Wylie – a respected officer of the Legislature who can’t be immediately fired for looking into the matter as Ms. Mentzelopoulos claims she was – has intentionally or not lent some credibility to the former CEO’s claims, at least in the court of public opinion.
“Permitting questioning regarding records provided to the auditor general in the context of an examination or other statutory function would be contrary to the public interest and has the potential to create a chilling effect on the general provision of records to the auditor general,” Mr. Wylie’s filing stated.
“These concerns are heightened in cases regarding allegations of misconduct, government overreach, and improper use of public funds falling within the scope of the auditor general’s mandate,” the argument continued, going on to say the cross-examination could be used to circumvent legislated protections. That, he said, “risks undermining the integrity of the examination.”
Last week, the Court of Appeal also gave Mr. Wylie limited intervenor status in the Mentzelopoulos lawsuit.
The court will decide what it decides in the fullness of time. In the meantime, though, we can safely reach one conclusion now: Mr. Wylie is unlikely to be around as Alberta’s auditor general after his current term expires on April 28, 2026.
CMA says it fears UCP interference will expand to treatment of more health issues
Yesterday, meanwhile, the Canadian Medical Association said it and three Alberta physicians have filed a constitutional challenge in the Court of King’s bench to Bill 26, the Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2024, on the grounds it interferes with the relationship between patients and their doctors when making treatment decisions.
The act, which came into effect in December 2024, “directs physicians on how to deliver gender-affirming care to people under 18, down to which medications they can use, when and how,” the CMA news release said. “This is an historic and unprecedented government intrusion into the physician-patient relationship and requires doctors to follow the law rather than clinical guidelines, the needs of patients and their own conscience.”
“When a government bans specific treatments, it interferes with a doctor’s ability to empower patients to choose the best care possible,” said CMA President Joss Reimer.
“This legislation has put me and many of my colleagues in a state of moral crisis,” said Jake Donaldson, a Calgary family physician who provides gender-affirming care to about 40 adolescents.
The CMA news release said the national physicians’ organization felt it had to step in “before this kind of political interference expands to other national health issues, such as vaccination, reproductive health, medical assistance in dying, or even cancers or surgeries resulting from lifestyle choices.”
This is a sound point, as UCP health policy is now clearly driven by MAGA ideology and hostility to expertise and science.
“The Alberta government should be spending its time, energy and resources on the 650,000 people in the province without a family doctor, not on the few hundred vulnerable youth seeking medical assistance,” the CMA statement concluded. This is advice, of course, that the UCP is certain to ignore.
There must be something quite damning in some of those 11 emails the UCP seems to desperately want to supress. Not only do they want to keep it from the public, but surely the Auditor General as a responsible officer of the Legislature is able to handle sensitive information appropriately.
If they really have nothing to hide, the UCP would do everyone a favour now by revealing what is in those emails. However, I doubt that will ever happen and they will continue to try supress them.
I agree that the Auditor General’s actions will hurt his continued future employment, but at some time you have to stand up to save what is left of your credibility. This may be one reason they also don’t have a Chief Medical Officer right now in the midst of a major measles outbreak. I suspect the current Alberta Government will also be avoided by other professionals who are concerned about their credibility.
Its seems like Smith’s attempts to micro manage doctors has led to yet another fight between them and her. So it seems like the culture wars and the war against doctors is also resuming.
I doubt more conflict between our petty and vindictive government and doctors will help us attract more of the doctors we desperately need. In fact likely the opposite, I suspect some will avoid or leave Alberta until this government which has been so consistently hostile to good health care is gone.
Knowing how the UCP conduct themselves, they will replace Doug Wylie with a more UCP friendly Auditor General. They have already done that with the Alberta Ethics Commissioner. Alas, the UCP might not succeed this time, because the Corrupt Care scandal has so much to it. It will get uglier, as more gets revealed.
You are correct, I have been sniffing around Alberta politics since Lougheed, and a respected source confided that there is plenty more to come, and it would otherwise be prejudicial to any government except Trumpian Alberta.
Goat rodeo? Is that another obscure Alberta expression that I missed when I took Alberta 101 at that workshop for newcomers back in ‘99 when I moved here? Like big hats & cows. Or rat-free except the Legislature. Please expound.
Lefty: The origin of the term is murky. Possibly military, probably American. It is generally used a more polite but still colourful version of “clusterfuck.” DJC
All I know is in our work place my colleagues were taking pictures of many things because of their distrust of their employer ,people were on edge ,couldn’t believe what was going on ,so extra pictures were needed
Our work place became a place of great disruption of patient care and their families
No doubt the medical profession has this gender identity business nailed down just as they did when they asserted that homosexuality was a “pathological sexuality” under the category of “psychopathic personality”. Or when they were sorting out those difficult females by performing frontal lobotomies. Science!
That, he said, “risks undermining the integrity of the examination.”
Well, yes, of course. That’s the whole idea.
“UCP health policy is now clearly driven by MAGA ideology and hostility to expertise and science.” That would rattle any informed and responsible citizen – which happen to be in short supply in Alberta.