Former Alberta minister calls for government transparency, tables cabinet notes

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This article was published 30/04/2025 (534 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

EDMONTON – The former Alberta cabinet minister removed from caucus says he’s been pestering the government in question period and tabling a series of documents in the legislature in an effort to provide transparency.

Peter Guthrie says transparency is what’s been missing from the United Conservative government as it continues to navigate a health-care contract scandal.

He told reporters Wednesday he’s trying to make up for that by making public pages of meeting notes he kept from his time in cabinet.

“I tried to work within the system to shine a light on the issues, but the government wasn’t interested in hearing it,” Guthrie said. “In fact, they’re still now in denial.

“So I’m just hoping by doing this I can provide a little bit of that transparency that I think the public deserves.”

Guthrie was expelled from caucus two weeks ago over his repeated criticism of the government’s handling of the scandal, which also led him to give up his cabinet post in February.

The scandal stems from a lawsuit filed by Athana Mentzelopoulos, the former head of Alberta Health Services.

Mentzelopoulos claims she was wrongfully fired in January to stop internal investigations she launched into sweetheart deals, high-level political interference and corruption in multimillion-dollar health contracts.

Premier Danielle Smith and Health Minister Adriana LaGrange have denied allegations of wrongdoing, claiming instead that Mentzelopoulos was fired for poor job performance and for stalling mandated health-care reform.

Claims from all sides have yet to be tested in court but multiple investigations have been launched, including by the RCMP and Alberta’s auditor general.

Guthrie, who sits as an Independent, continued what’s become a trend of tablings Wednesday, submitting to the public record handwritten meeting notes he took during a cabinet meeting shortly before he resigned as infrastructure minister.

According to the notes, which read as a script of talking points, Guthrie was becoming increasingly concerned about the government’s reasoning for dismissing the board of Alberta Health Services the month before. 

He has previously accused LaGrange and Smith of misleading a cabinet health committee, which voted in late January to dismiss the board. 

The notes say LaGrange told the committee that the board was “holding up the implementation” of Acute Care Alberta, the Crown corporation being set up to oversee AHS as part of the government’s massive overhaul of health-care delivery.

But, according to Guthrie’s notes, a former board member told him the board’s dismissal came just days after the board met to discuss legal advice it had been given to send the auditor general and the RCMP a letter received from Mentzelopoulos after she was fired a few weeks earlier.

LaGrange had advised the board not to forward the letter, according to Guthrie’s notes, but “one or two days later they submitted that letter as they felt they had a legal obligation to do so.”

Guthrie said LaGrange didn’t relay that information to the health cabinet committee when she asked it dismiss the board three days later.

He wrote that the unnamed board member’s rendition of events gave him “enough reason to cast significant doubt on (LaGrange’s) judgment here.”

A letter addressed to the auditor general Guthrie tabled along with the notes Wednesday says he decided to leave cabinet after the Feb. 19 meeting as the rest of his colleagues were mum on his concerns.

“Overall, the sentiment in the room was that I was fabricating a problem where none existed and behaving like a conspiracy theorist,” Guthrie wrote to the auditor general.

Smith’s press secretary Sam Blackett said Wednesday that Guthrie and the Opposition NDP are free to “share their personal theories and other materials” with the auditor general but denied the claim that cabinet committee members were misled in order to dismiss the board of AHS.

“(LaGrange) clearly expressed to cabinet the relevant reasons for why she felt the need to replace the board with an official administrator to assist with the final transition of AHS into a hospital service provider,” Blackett said in a statement.

“Any accusation that staff or the minister withheld information relevant to that decision is absolutely false.”

Wednesday’s tabling followed two other sets of notes Guthrie tabled the day before, including notes from the health cabinet committee meeting wherein LaGrange asked the committee to dismiss the board of AHS. 

In those notes, Guthrie wrote that he felt like “there is more to this story.”

That tabling included a text message Guthrie received from Smith’s chief of staff, saying there “probably is more Pete — but I feel you need to trust those that are spending hundreds of hours trying to work on this to do their job.”

The government also confirmed this week that it had issued a six-month contract extension to the private surgical company at the heart of Mentzelopoulos’s allegations. 

Mentzelopoulos has claimed she faced pressure from government officials to sign the company’s last contract extension from October, despite her concerns about the rates being paid. 

In question period Tuesday, Smith said the government signed another extension despite the ongoing investigations as it couldn’t risk having thousands of hip and knee surgeries be cancelled.

“We’re just not going to do that,” Smith said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 30, 2025.