Third-Party Review of Alberta Health Contracting Affair Finds Organization Breached Its Own Rules

An Alberta Health Services sign is pictured outside a hospital in Calgary on March 20, 2025. The Canadian Press/Jeff McIntosh

An independent probe into Alberta Health Services (AHS) has found no wrongdoing on the part of Premier Danielle Smith or government officials, but concludes that serious mismanagement at AHS led to potential conflicts of interest and a lack of transparency.

The investigation, conducted by former Manitoba chief judge Raymond Wyant, combed through more than two million documents and conducted dozens of interviews, with an Oct. 15 report concluding there was “no evidence” of wrongdoing by elected officials. Wyant also found that AHS breached its own policies in buying pain medication and contracting a private surgery facility.

“I am deeply disappointed with the way these procurements and contracts were dealt with by AHS decision makers and some of its employees,” Smith said in an Oct. 17 statement on Wyant’s findings. “AHS procurement of the children’s pain medication, and in the case of one of the surgical facility contracts, was not consistent with its own procurement policies.”

The report puts forward 18 recommendations to boost transparency and eliminate conflict-of-interest risks in AHS policies.

The investigation began earlier this year after former AHS CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos alleged she had been dismissed from her job in January because she had launched an internal investigation into AHS contracts and procurement practices. She also alleged she was pressured by Alberta government officials to sign new deals for chartered surgical facilities, which are private health-care facilities approved by the province to perform publicly funded surgeries. Her allegations haven’t been tested in court.

The government of Alberta subsequently appointed Wyant in March to assess Mentzelopoulos’s concerns, allocating $500,000 for the investigation.

Alberta Health Minister Adriana LaGrange said at the time that many of the accusations made by Mentzelopoulos were “clearly false.” Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi, however, criticized the investigation for not going far enough, saying it lacked important tools afforded in a public inquiry such as the ability to subpoena individuals and require testimony under oath.

Wyant’s Findings

Wyant’s report said that AHS paid for approximately $69.8 million for pain medication for minors but only received $20.6 million of the shipment. Roughly $49 million of product was never delivered, not approved by Health Canada, kept unused in storage, or was unusable but not accounted for. The report says that the contract in this case was not checked by the AHS legal team and did not have enough transparency on pricing and supplier comparison.

Wyant also found that several top AHS officials had seeming or confirmed conflicts of interest by being involved in, or later involved in, companies contracted by AHS. The report observes an overall lack of due diligence and transparency with no reliable system for questioning irregularities in contracts and easily overridden procurement rules for medication orders. It also said that AHS staff did not have a dependable or consistent way to voice concerns and assumed any issues were being handled by higher-ups.

“Most people seemed to have assumed that those in charge were aware of and had dealt with (or were dealing with) these matters, but this does not appear to have been the case,” Wyant writes in the report.

Wyant found that two senior AHS officials—former chief procurement officer Jitendra Prasad and former senior program officer Blayne Iskiw—were involved in procurement of private clinics that they later worked with, or in one case still linked with while providing consultant services to AHS. The report found that AHS knew about some of these potential conflicts of interest but did not investigate them.

Smith to Implement Recommendations

Smith said the findings in Wyant’s report show that more needs to be done to ensure a “rigorous process” for spending taxpayer money at AHS.

“When elected officials request products or services be procured for the public, we trust that there are rigorous processes in place to ensure taxpayer dollars are respected and that those processes be followed. We also expect that any conflicts of interest, real or perceived, are properly disclosed and protected against,” Smith said. “Clearly, AHS decision makers did not do so in these cases.”

Smith says her government will begin implementing all 18 of Wyant’s recommendations, which include creating an online conflict-of-interest registry and vendor code of conduct laying out clear regulations and fines for infractions.

The report also recommends boosting protection for whistleblowers, creating longer “cooling off” times before former AHS employees can work for companies they were involved with in their AHS roles, and ban any AHS employee from acting for a vendor and AHS simultaneously in any procurement deal.

Smith said Alberta will also move ahead with a new funding system for surgeries, in which providers get a fixed fee for each completed procedure, so that costs are clearer and taxpayers’ money is used more efficiently. The province has been shifting many AHS responsibilities into new agencies as part of legislation passed in May of last year. The four agencies are Primary Care Alberta, Recovery Alberta, Assisted Care Alberta, and Acute Care Alberta.

The change decentralizes decision-making, and reorients responsibility for specific health-care needs to different departments. Wyant said all changes recommended in his report should be accordingly applied where relevant to the new departments.

“AHS is having some of its responsibilities assigned to newly created agencies,” Wyant notes in the report. “Therefore, these recommendations are made with the expectation that they would be applied to any new entity within the health system, where any procurement responsibilities reside.”