“This isn’t mismanagement—it’s a scandal”—Mike Parker, president of the Health Sciences Association, calling for an independent investigation into the Alberta Surgical Initiative (a $400 Mill effort to outsource surgeries to for-profit organizations).
Ms Soapbox has wrecked her back and, as such, can’t sit still for very long, however she has a few words to say about the recent Globe and Mail article in which Ms Mentzelopoulos (Ms M), former CEO of AHS, made a number of incendiary allegations about the Alberta government interfering with procurement and contracting procedures at AHS.
The gist of Ms M’s allegations is that AHS (ie the Alberta taxpayer) may have been pressured by the government (the Alberta taxpayer’s proxy) into overpaying for for-profit healthcare services (including services it would not necessarily receive).
After three days of saying nothing, Premier Smith issued a brief press release in which she said:
- She’s asking the AG for an expedited review and directed her officials to be “fully transparent with the AG
- She wants AHS to finish its internal review as quickly as possible so “we can study the results and make improvements or adjustments to these processes”
- AHS has paused contracting for these surgical facilities, and
- “As Premier, [she] was not involved in any wrongdoing. Any insinuation to the contrary is false, baseless and defamatory.”
Of those points, it’s the last one that’s most interesting.
Why?
Because the AG doesn’t have to prove “wrongdoing” (certainly not in the criminal beyond-a-reasonable-doubt sense). All he has to do is show a lack of compliance with AHS and Alberta Health procurement and contracting policies, which no doubt include a series of checks and balances to ensure maximum bang for the buck, ie every single taxpayer dollar is spent wisely and is properly accounted for.
If there’s a scintilla of substance to Ms M’s allegations, we’ll hear about it. And heads will roll.
So on the topic of rolling heads, this might be a good time to remind the premier—who seems to think the private sector is the holy grail for public services—that there is one thing the private sector does very well.
When something goes horribly wrong on a CEO’s watch, they resign—BP’s CEO, Anthony Bryan Hayward, did not install the defective blow-out-protector used in the Deep Water Horizon oil well—but he resigned when it exploded.
The premier’s record with outsourcing healthcare services, be it DynaLife lab services, Turkish Tylenol, or the Alberta Surgical Initiative, leaves a lot to be desired.
But if the AG determines that Ms M’s allegations have substance, that’s the last straw.
The premier must resign.
Susan on the Soapbox 
Part of the long list of things our Premier does not do well, is take responsibility.
Talk to a rightwing pastor with a criminal case before the Court, 🤷🏽♂️.
Order $70 million worth of inappropriate analgesics and have only a useless fraction delivered 🤷🏽♂️.
Privatize medical testing only to have it fall into chaos and have to be rescued at “taxpayers’ expense” 🤷🏽♂️.
Flipflop on mining the eastern slopes 🤷🏽♂️.
Change the rules on gifts to politicians 🤷🏽♂️.
Really foul up the building of the Greenline, costing billions of dollars🤷🏽♂️.
The list goes on and on. One thing we can be sure about is the Premier does not believe any of this should stick to her.
Does the AG have the power to require Marshall Smith to answer questions, now that his time as the Chief of Staff seems to have come to a convenient end?
Always believed it was only a matter of time before DS would go down. And if the allegations are true she needs to resign. She won’t agree, of course, but may very well be forced into it.
Amy: I agree. She won’t go willingly but I’m banking on the fact that even UCP supporters won’t tolerate extreme incompetence and gladhanding for ever. (I hope I’m not overestimating their intelligence!)
Amy, it’s a matter of how many straws it takes to break a camel’s back. We must be getting down to the bottom of the haystack. There aren’t that many straws left. (OK, that was a tortured metaphor, I think my pain meds are kicking in.)
She likely should resign, but she likely won’t resign.
Albertan’s have a kind of weird double standard when it comes to their political leaders. In general, we let them get away with a very great deal……like, who resigned over the War Room fiasco that wasted millions, defamed environmental groups and found nothing??
Danielle Smith is who she is, and we’ve known surely, who she is, for decades. She has a 91% approval rating with the party I think……so fume and sputter as we may on the progressive side of things…..we’re stuck with this person until the 2027 election….
And there remains a lot of damage she still is going to be able to do. But then, we’ve been voting for lower taxes and cuts to public spending since the 90’s…..this kind of ideologically motivated waste of what tax money we still do collect is the inevitable result of years of penny pinching……
By right wingers who in point of fact, aren’t good money managers themselves.
noklebym: That’s true, too many people have it in their heads that conservatives (or whatever the UCP mutation is) are good money managers, and the NDP are not. this completely misses the point. The reason the PCs were “good” money managers was because they used royalty revenues to fill the holes in their budget. When this revenue stream disappears, they’re hooped. But the myth remains strong.
If we tallied up all the Conservative boondoggles, going back to Klein…..we’d likely be appalled by how much money that could have gone into educating our kids…..or making health care better…….Conservatives have wasted over the years.
This latest procurement scandal is small change compared to that Swan Hills waste treatment plant they’ve poured billions into over the years. How many Albertans even know about it???
noklebym: I must admit I’m not familiar with the Swan Hill debacle.
This was sent me on line by a friend…..I’ll repeat it as he sent it:
The $500 million Swan Hills waste treatment plant scandal, that has grown to 10 times its original cost from annual added bailouts over the last 24 years.
I’d love it if someone like you could research a few of the failed projects over the decades, because I know I’ve heard of others……..but there is such a culture of silence in Alberta that pretty soon Kenney’s War Room will be more myth than memory………and how much did they waste on that paranoid fantasy, only to find nothing to indicate environmental agencies had targeted Alberta in any substantive or systematic way???
My friend also suggested the electricity deregulation Klein pushed through was a bit of a scandal…..I’d like to know how much it cost taxpayers to go to a privatized system that now seems to be very expensive for ratepayers.
Does trickle down Reaganomics/Thatchernomics include responsibility for economics? The top of that autocratic chart takes the responsibilities for the decisions and responsibilities for dealing with the outcome of careful, perhaps deliberate, mismanagement trickles down to us?
Hey! Know what? The elected Cabinet officials pretend they are the bosses of us, but they are not. The people are at the top of the organisation chart. The crap for malfeasance flows downhill to the servants of the people, the ones we elected just exactly to prevent and avoid this kind of stuff.
Someone please carry out the can.
Mikegklein: That was clever on so many levels. Thanks!
Thank you Susan for your attention to this very, very serious story and for bringing it to our attention.
Mikegklein: you’re welcome. The real credit goes to Carrie Tait and the Globe and Mail. I’m hoping that they keep digging until all the facts come out. Then we’ll have to find a way to help Albertans (particularly UCP supporters) understand exactly what’s happening to their tax dollars.
Hello Mrs. Soapbox,
I hope that your back is better soon.
I don’t think that Danielle Smith is likely to follow the ministerial tradition of taking responsibility. I can’t imagine that she would resign, although it is the appropriate course of action.
Danielle Smith does not seem to have offered to make the AHS review public. I imagine that she will not release any details.
Is there any requirement to make the Auditor General’s report public?
Christina: I suspect you’re right. The decent thing to do would be to resign. However the conservatives preferred course of action is to deny, deny, deny, and when the people don’t believe you, throw someone else under the bus. Then after the dust settles give them a cushy new position somewhere to thank them for their service to the party.
Smith must go down with the ship – particularly because she gutted the steering system (past AHS executives with knowledge, experience and respect). She then has gone through 5 CEO’s of her choosing and fired them – so she threw out any paddles or life jackets. And for the second time she fired the whole Board (the navigation system) when they wanted to expose alleged contract procedures to the RCMP. So, no paddles, no steerage, no navigation system – this ship belongs to the Premier and Health Minister and they can ride it to the bottom of the sea. They have totally broken the system and broken the trust of Albertans. When you take over control and it goes badly – there is accountability. Denials and blaming others is insufficient. Lives of Albertans depend on it.
Dawn: what an excellent metaphor! Thank you.
The premier should resign, but she won’t do it willingly, and who is going to make her? Certainly not the UCP leadership, or Take Back Alberta who have made it their mission to occupy UCP constituency association boards.
But in any case, jettisoning the CEO doesn’t mean the organization itself changes anything, and the conservative party is certainly no exception. Smith would have known about the corruption in the UCP-controlled health care system, but there are a lot more people involved who played and continue to play an essential role, within the government and outside it too. For example as long as those private clinics are still allowed to do business with the government, nothing much will change.
So yes, the premier should resign, and the health minister too, just for a start. But we need also to have a public conversation about exactly how the corruption was possible and what it takes to stop it. And this conversation has to yield results at election time. Hand wringing alone changes nothing.
Alfredo: you raise a very good point, namely that Smith and LaGrange don’t work in isolation. They have staff om the premier’s office and Alberta Health and possibly other departments who dealt with the AHS staff. This calls into question the ethics of their actions as well. I wonder how deep the AG is going to go in his investigation.
Also on a related point, the AG said that his investigation may expand beyond AHS and the Alberta Health. Like I said elsewhere, this is going to be the most important investigation in Alberta’s political history.
Again the government is trying to cover up and make sure we never read anything about it and if this follows the same route as before, it will get lost in translation and in the meantime bit by bit we become a illiberal dictatorship at provincial level and possibly at federal level as well.
This morning Trump again said that Canada does not have an army and so it should become a state. He will say that as many times as needed to convince the world and the US that we are definitely part of the US.
I am not sure what the end of this psycho attack is going to be but as a Canadian citizen it is clear to me that the US just does not look at us as an independent nation anymore. So what are we waiting for? Recall our ambassador to the US and start the process of shutting down our relationship with them period. If we do not do it, they will slowly take over by force. That much is clear to me. Trumps plan is to take over what he needs to become not only the economic empire they are already but also a territorial one. He will take over Canada to become the richest, biggest country in the world and along with Greenland, a mineral powerhouse.
Judging by what Canada has done so far, I think we will be absorbed without a scream.
Do you trust any Liberal or Conservative Federal government? I do not.
I will never change my nationality even if the US army walks in here and makes all Guantanamo prisoners.
I rather think we are watching the demise of the United States as a global power. It’s like a huge elephant collapsing, we just have to make sure we get out of the way so we don’t get crushed as it collapses.
In the long run I agree with you, but like you say, I am worried how we are going get out of the way to let them crash with their heads first.
Gosh the Vance circus in Europe today, giving the EU a scolding on democracy was embarrassing to me and I was not there. What a display of incompetence by an idiot without an inch of shame.
Other than the German minister, the Europeans showed a lack of courage to shoot him down period. Allowing it to happen without a reaction is a big mistake.
Appreciate your comment. I do believe you are right.
So the propaganda is that the US subsidizes Canada and that of course we are not a viable country and so we need to become the 51 State. Then we have our premiers at different levels professing to be the ‘Canada First’ people with all the ideas about Buy Canadian and the ‘We are not for sale” hats.
Trump is a liar and he certainly knows that with neoliberalism and the free markets and the full open of our markets to foreign companies, the US already has won an economic war against Canada. We own the crumbs of course.
A detailed study of our economy, for sure is not a pretty picture for us but a much better one for the US. Lets us just read this article on a fraction of our real economy.
Of course this is not in the mainstream media because, according to them, this is fake news. The problem is that it will continue to be fake news helped by our own premiers that sell themselves easily to any country if the price is right.
Canadians, just like the third world, are being duped big time. I am sure many will say , this is a socialist article. OK at least read it. We are where we are because we are brainwashed to follow the mainstream garbage.
Unfortunately it is not just our Daniella.
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/to-respond-to-trumps-tariffs-nationalize-the-oil-industry