More Turmoil at Alberta Health Services, CEO Out

After working just one year and 32 days of her four-year contract, Athana Mentzelopoulos is no longer president and CEO of Alberta Health Services. Did the former Alberta and B.C. senior civil servant jump or was she pushed?

It’s not clear. We’ll likely never get a straight answer from Premier Danielle Smith or anyone else in her United Conservative Party government, but we might find some clues in what the government had to say Wednesday about the latest chaos at the former provincial health authority.

“Acute care is the most complex part of the health-care system, and it’s critical that we have the right leadership in place to see this work through and make positive changes to the health-care system for Albertans now and into the future,” said Health Minister Adriana LaGrange in a canned quote in the government’s news release. “I want to extend my sincerest gratitude to Athana Mentzelopoulos for the work she has done during her time leading Alberta Health Services.”

“We are at a critical time in the work that is underway to refocus the health-care system,” said UCP-appointed AHS board chair Angela Fong in the same release. “I am confident we can continue to make great strides to achieve the goal of making health care better for everyone in Alberta. I want to thank Athana Mentzelopoulos for her hard work, commitment and leadership during her time in the role.”

In a statement emailed to AHS staff, physicians and volunteers shortly before the unexpected announcement was made public, Fong, a former senior executive at the Crown-owned Alberta Investment Management Corp., also said of Mentzelopoulos, “as she departs from this role, effective today, I want to thank her for all her work during her time and I want to wish her the very best.”

Because Mentzelopoulos started work on Dec. 7, 2023, as long as she wasn’t fired for just cause, according to her contract she’s now owed her entire base salary of $583,443 for 2025.

Whatever happened, this suggests her departure was not carefully planned. One imagines an effort will be made to have Mentzelopoulos’s tenure at AHS disappear down the memory hole as quickly as possible.

This may be easier to achieve than in the case of her highly respected predecessor, Dr. Verna Yiu, who has been active on social media defending the public health-care system since she was fired by the previous UCP premier, Jason Kenney, for being too independent-minded, too committed to the public health-care system and too serious about public health during the pandemic for the UCP’s taste.

Yiu, who was the longest-serving AHS CEO from 2016 to 2022, is now provost and academic vice-president of the University of Alberta.

But Mentzelopoulos, who endured controversy in British Columbia as a member of former B.C. premier Christy Clark’s inner circle, kept a low profile throughout her time in Alberta as a senior civil servant and as Alberta Health Services CEO. She may not wish to find herself back in the spotlight.

Ostensibly, Wednesday’s press release was about the appointments of new interim presidents to AHS and the government’s separate new Acute Care Alberta bureaucratic entity.

But reading official Alberta news releases written for the Smith government is a bit like reading Pravda or Izvestiya in the bad old days of the Soviet Union: The real news is rarely found at the top of the story.

Dr. Chris Eagle will run Acute Care Alberta for now, the release said, and Andre Tremblay will “help support Dr. Eagle’s work and… lead AHS through its transition from a regional health authority to a hospital-based service provider.”

Dr. Eagle is a former president and CEO of Alberta Health Services, who was appointed to a five-year term in that role on April 1, 2011, and quit just over two and a half years later in the fall of 2013.

The press release noted: “This appointment will take effect Feb. 1 to coincide with the establishment of Acute Care Alberta as a legal entity…. His appointment to the position is pending finalization of his contract.” It is odd the government announced his appointment before his contact has been negotiated, since it puts Eagle in an extremely advantageous negotiating position.

Tremblay is the deputy minister of Alberta Health as the provincial Health Department is confusingly known. As of Sept. 19, he was also a member of the AHS board.

“Tremblay will work with AHS leadership to oversee operations, support staff transitions to Primary Care Alberta and establish Acute Care Alberta as a legal entity ahead of its operationalization this spring,” said the news release, promising confidently that “Albertans will continue to access acute care services as they always have and there will be no impact to frontline health-care workers.”

Seemingly trying to justify the UCP’s creation of new bureaucratic agencies, LaGrange told an Edmonton Journal reporter that “it became very clear through the modernizing of Alberta’s primary care system that there needed to be dedicated leadership for primary care.” Then she claimed that in the past such work “was being done somewhat off the side of people’s desks.”

Meanwhile, according to the press release, Tremblay will continue to do his full-time job as the Health Ministry’s top civil servant while he also does the full-time job of AHS president and CEO. While the release did not explain which side of his desk will be devoted to running AHS, it did say he will receive only his generous civil service salary.

The government-appointed AHS board of directors will now start to look for (another) permanent president and CEO, the release said. Readers should not expect the successful applicant to be dedicated to the idea of preserving public health care.

NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi issued a toughly worded statement on the latest managerial shambles at AHS. “It may be a new year, but the UCP is still following their old playbook: undermining public health care and creating chaos for patients and staff,” he said.

“Danielle Smith and Adriana LaGrange keep attacking acute care by firing CEOs and appointing more insiders instead of fixing the very real problems Albertans are facing,” Nenshi added, making obvious the opposition party’s interpretation of Mentzelopoulos’s departure.

“This is now the fourth CEO and the fourth board chair the UCP has gone through since 2021,” he observed. “Alberta now has six health-care organizations each with their own management layer and the UCP still cannot get it right.”

“Danielle Smith promised to fix health care in 90 days,” he continued. “That was 810 days ago and all we’ve seen is a system on the verge of collapse, more new managers for them to blame, and worse patient outcomes.”

“Smith and LaGrange keep looking for people to blame for this disaster,” he concluded, adding that it’s “time for them to look in the mirror” — a powerfully evocative phrase in Alberta political discourse.