Alberta Premier Danielle Smith speaks in Edmonton on Nov. 8.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
For a Premier who has said she wants the pandemic to be in the rear-view mirror, Danielle Smith sure lets a lot of holdover grudges from the depths of COVID-19 direct her decision-making now.
Her government, for example, ousted chief medical officer of health Deena Hinshaw in late 2022. Some might also put the dismantling of the province’s centralized health agency, Alberta Health Services (AHS), in this category as well.
And now, a senior AHS administrator has gone public about his decision to quit earlier this year. Braden Manns told The Globe and Mail’s Carrie Tait that he believed Ms. Smith’s office quashed the organization’s plan to hire Dr. Hinshaw to a part-time position at the Indigenous health program run by AHS, which he spelled out in his resignation letter in June. Dr. Manns’s letter added that John Cowell – whom Ms. Smith had handpicked to be official administrator at AHS – told him “the Premier is firm that there can be no hiring of Dr. Hinshaw.”
Dr. Hinshaw had been selected by people who run the program, and critically, noted Dr. Manns, she has an excellent relationship with Indigenous communities. Esther Tailfeathers, the senior medical director of the program, told the CBC in June she also resigned from AHS over the way it terminated the preferred candidate.
Alberta’s ethics commissioner Marguerite Trussler (who could be replaced when her contract expires in 2024) said this week that no rules were broken when Dr. Hinshaw was hired for – then promptly blocked from taking – this job. Although Dr. Cowell had input on the decision, Ms. Trussler found no evidence he directed the termination of Dr. Hinshaw’s employment.
But at some point, her hiring was deemed an impossibility. How exactly this played out still isn’t clear.
On Monday, the Premier said at a news conference that AHS hiring decisions are made by AHS. On Tuesday, Ms. Smith said it again. But then she also appeared to kind of own the decision, saying that there are going to be lots of personnel changes at AHS, that the government will be “highly involved,” and that nobody should be surprised by that. When a reporter asked whether Dr. Hinshaw is persona non grata in Alberta, the Premier replied: “Look, I’ve made my position very clear. When I chose a new chief medical officer of health, I knew we needed new leadership there.”
There are several issues here. One is that Ms. Smith already has one outstanding example of political interference on her résumé. In May, Ms. Trussler found that the Premier should have known that her conversation with Alberta’s justice minister on behalf of a pastor facing COVID-19-era criminal charges contravened the province’s Conflicts of Interest Act.
Another question is whether, amid a highly competitive countrywide race for the best health care workers, competent public health officials will want to work in Alberta if the government seems intent on ousting so many high-level staff. In 2022, Mark Joffe was appointed to replace Dr. Hinshaw as the chief medical officer of health on an interim basis. That “interim” term has now stretched on for more than a year. One cannot help but wonder if it’s hard to find someone who wants that fraught job on a permanent basis.
Dr. Manns says he’s not so naïve as to believe that politics never intrudes in health care. But he still believes there’s a massive ethical problem in the Premier apparently “reaching down four levels into AHS” to rescind an approved contract after a comprehensive search process. He’s also now worried, on a practical level, about this government micromanaging the health care system.
“It just leads to gridlock,” he said.
Of course, there is a cohort of Albertans among whom Dr. Hinshaw’s name is akin to an epithet. They will cheer on government involvement – or at least won’t find it problematic. Dr. Hinshaw was blamed for vaccine passports, mask mandates and social-gathering limits, which Ms. Smith referred to on Tuesday: “We need the right people in place that have the confidence of the public.”
Everyone has to ask themselves that old question of what they would think if the situation were reversed – if a political leader you disagree with reached into the middle levels of the public sector to block someone’s career.
In some alternative timeline, where Dr. Hinshaw was allowed to take the job, most Albertans would have likely shrugged their shoulders. It would be a timeline where Ms. Smith would be free to talk about the failings of Ottawa’s electric-vehicle mandate or plastics ban without reporters pestering her about whether she interfered, once again.
But then, it would also be a timeline where Ms. Smith, as she said she wants to do, let pandemic bygones be bygones.