Braid: A gutsy minister shows cabinet worry over private surgery scandal​on February 18, 2025 at 10:35 pm

Pete Guthrie, Alberta’s infrastructure minister, knows his mind and never hesitates to say what’s on it.

As a backbench MLA in Premier Jason Kenney’s time, he said the leader’s top-down style fostered “a culture of fear.”

Guthrie was one of the fierce caucus critics who helped bring down Kenney.

Now he’s unhappy again. He told cabinet last week that Adriana LaGrange, the health minister, should be moved to a new portfolio while allegations of cushy surgery contracts are investigated.

He said the same should apply to Andre Tremblay, the deputy health minister who is now both the CEO of AHS and serves in place of the entire board that was fired.

Then came the kicker in the Guthrie memo that leaked to the CBC’s Jason Markusoff:

“If any of the information obtained appears to be criminal in nature, all materials must be turned over to the RCMP immediately.”

That’s exactly what the appointed AHS board wanted to do before they were canned.

It’s remarkable that this memo even exists. Ministers generally make their case verbally and leave it at that.

But Guthrie was obviously not satisfied with Premier Danielle Smith’s decision to keep both LaGrange and Tremblay in place, while promising to exclude them from the investigation.

The second remarkable fact is that the memo leaked. Nothing in government is more sacred than cabinet secrecy.

I’m told by multiple sources that Guthrie is not the leaker. This suggests wider discontent in cabinet.

Smith acknowledged as much in her weekly radio gig on Saturday. She promised a full investigation and added, “If we can address the concerns people have, that will satisfy most of my cabinet.”

It probably will. In a crunch, most cabinet ministers will side with their all-powerful boss.

But this should not satisfy the public.

The allegations from Athana Mentzelopoulos, the fired AHS boss who is suing for wrongful dismissal, bear directly on the premier’s office and the health department, not the health authority she ran.

She alleges there was intense political pressure to grant surgery contracts to Alberta Surgical Group, involving much higher fees than other private groups received.

She was also deeply concerned about the huge amount — $70 million — paid for a Tylenol substitute from Turkey.

This involved some of the same principles as the surgery contracts. So did those hockey tickets for ministers in last year’s Stanley Cup playoffs.

When that many dots connect, you start hearing the same thing from people close to the story: