All posts tagged Stephen Duckett

Redford Government just can’t seem to stop fumbling health care expenses frenzy

by David Climenhaga on April 19, 2013 in Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics, Alison Redford with 2 Comments

Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne, right, helps Premier Alison Redford get ready to face Opposition questions about Alberta Health Services expense accounts. Alberta politicians may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Health executives Michele Lahey, Sheila Weatherill, Alison Tonge. 

The clueless ineptitude of the Redford Government dealing with Alberta’s continuing health system expense account brouhaha is matched only by the belligerence of the Opposition in portraying the situation as an outrage and a scandal.

Since mainstream media now routinely refer to the matter that way – “Redford, opposition trade barbs over Alberta Health Services expense scandal,” is how the Edmonton Journal headlined the story yesterday – it’s fair to say the opposition strategy is working.

Whether it’s in answers to questions in the Legislature, management of issues by Premier Alison Redford’s newly hired phalanx of former Ontario spin doctors, the juvenile quality of a stream of mean-spirited Tweets from the deputy premier’s BlackBerry, or just the Progressive Conservatives’ apparent inability to predict when the next embarrassing story is about to break, her government seems to be operating without a clue in a cartload!

Rudimentary issues-management skills should have allowed Ms. Redford to step out of the way with aplomb when the two latest loads of stuff hit the proverbial fan. Instead, she got splattered!

The first one was this week’s revelation that in 2008 a senior Capital Health Region executive had a trip to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for cancer tests, which by the sound of it weren’t needed, approved by her boss as a legitimate expense to be paid by the public.

“I was instructed to go for a further consultation at the Mayo Clinic by my boss to ensure that I was clear of the condition. As it was not my decision, it was funded by my employer,” former CHR vice-president Michele Lahey told a local newspaper after she was tracked down at the private hospital where she now works in the United Kingdom.

“I do not believe I have done anything wrong,” she added. So no, she wouldn’t be repaying the money – and, as Health Minister Fred Horne admitted, the government concluded it didn’t have a leg to stand on when it pondered trying to collect the $7,800 from her.

Ms. Redford wasn’t even thought of as a potential premier at the time this happened, let alone the occupant of the office. Mr. Horne wasn’t the minister either. And, for heaven’s sake, Alberta Health Services hadn’t even been created – and when it was it was supposedly in part to fix just such problems.

Yet Ms. Redford and her advisors let that ball just sail by. Even the fact it originated with a Freedom of Information filing apparently failed to alert the government the story was about to break.

Still, since it also looked as much like a case of line jumping as one of expense account shenanigans, the government could plausibly have pleaded it was looking into that through the Health Care Preferential Treatment Inquiry led by retired judge John Vertes.

Alas for them, they’d already closed that affair down – apparently over the wishes of Judge Vertes – managing to make the whole thing look like a cover-up on top of everything else.

You have to admit, it takes real talent to bungle things this badly! And we’re still less than halfway through the story!

The second punch in the one-two combination came in the form of the next revelation, that another former senior health executive – this one hired for Alberta Health Services by former CEO Stephen Duckett, the fellow fired in November 2011 for misusing an oatmeal-raisin cookie – had been allowed to expense $1,200 in medical tests needed to get permission to move to Canada.

Surely the government could have blown that one off with the excuse it’s standard practice to do such things when recruiting top executives from abroad?

But, no, perhaps from bad luck, perhaps by bad management, they seem to have managed to drop that ball too. Maybe they forgot because, barely three years after she was hired as strategy and performance VP, Alison Tonge had also packed up and moved back to the U.K.

Now it’s been revealed by the Calgary Herald AHS paid Ms. Tonge at least $426,576 to go away!

This too happened before Ms. Redford’s watch began, but no matter. You’d think the government would have figured out by now the FOI requests just aren’t going to stop until journalists have pumped that well dry, so they might as well release everything and make a virtue of necessity. Don’t count on it, though, because strategic thinking doesn’t seem to be part of the Redford Government’s repertoire.

Yesterday afternoon, former Capital Health CEO Sheila Weatherill threw up her hands at this and said she shouldn’t have authorized Ms. Lahey’s trip to Minnesota, so she’d personally pay back the $7,800 – the cost plus inflation. Maybe she’s just nostalgic for the days the local media used to treat her with adulation.

A gleeful Mr. Horne – who may or may not have come up with the idea himself – told the media he had Ms. Weatherill’s cheque in hand.

Not that this is likely to end the feeding frenzy any time soon. Somebody’s bound to do so anyway, so it might as well be me that points out this still leaves Ms. Weatherill with $1,492,200 of her controversial 2008 buyout – and that’s not counting her $1.7-million executive retirement plan and her pension!

Since all three opposition parties have got their teeth into a good thing with this stuff, we can’t reasonably expect any of them to stop as long as the headlines keep coming.

And as we get closer to the next election in 2015, it’s safe to predict the Opposition will up the ante.

In particular, the Official Opposition, the far-right Wildrose Party under former Fraser Institute intern Danielle Smith, which has no more use for public health care than most of Ms. Redford’s caucus and cabinet, is joined at the hip with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party. As is well known, Mr. Harper’s Robocall Party has negative campaigning implanted deep in its political DNA.

If in the run-up to the next election in 2016 the Wildrosers don’t stoop to the kind of advertising we just saw welcome Justin Trudeau to his new role as federal Liberal leader, it will be an astonishing development.

So if Ms. Redford and her insiders can’t up their game, we are led inevitably to two conclusions:

First, the next three years will see politics in Alberta descend to a whole new low of American-style viciousness – the fear of which made former Premier Ed Stelmach throw up his hands and quit in 2011.

Second, if the premier can’t get her act together, the possibility of a Wildrose government – which seemed laughably unlikely a year ago as Ms. Redford’s PCs celebrated their comfortable election victory – every day seems more like a probability.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

AHS chair to politicians: Do as I say, not as I do!

by David Climenhaga on April 12, 2013 in Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics with 2 Comments

10-4 Good Buddy! Why is Stephen Lockwood, above, getting to drive this truck, while Chris Eagle’s got the airbrakes ticket? Just wondering. Senior Alberta Health Services officials may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: The real Stephen Lockwood; Stephen Duckett, with his politically fatal cookie.

The newish chairman of the board of Alberta Health Services, this province’s massive public health agency, was in the media yesterday advising elected representatives to keep their paws off day-to-day operations of the health care system.

A culture of political interference is creating big problems, Stephen Lockwood complained to a local newspaper, and Something Must Be Done. Probably a lot of Albertans nodded their heads in agreement with this without thinking too carefully about what Mr. Lockwood was actually saying.

“If you guys want to set the policy, OK, but you can’t be interfering in the daily operations,” Mr. Lockwood told Alberta’s politicians, as channelled by the Edmonton Journal. (The italics, however, were added by me.)

And if you don’t like it, added the Okotoks trucking company executive and lawyer not long after the AHS budget was released, “you can direct us or you can replace us.”

Well, OK … I guess.

But isn’t that exactly what Mr. Lockwood is doing?

Let me explain. Alberta Health Services has a president and chief executive officer – a physician by the name of Chris Eagle – who is paid considerably more than half a million free-floating Canadian Credonias every year to operate the massive $13-billion-plus agency, which is a branch of the provincial government in all but name.

Dr. Eagle was appointed, it is true, when the guy previously in that job started to annoy some of the same elected politicians that Mr. Lockwood is unhappy about.

Back in November 2010, that fellow, an Australian PhD economist by the name of Stephen Duckett, finally committed a major blunder with an oatmeal-raisin cookie and the politicians who had hired him and then grown tired of him had the opportunity they’d been looking for to skid him all the way back to the Antipodes. Nowadays, safely back in Australia, Dr. Duckett happily works for a policy think tank and receives reams of positive media coverage.

Dr. Eagle’s job, like that of Dr. Duckett before him, is to run the day-to-day operations of Alberta Health Services within the budget he is given by the board, which in turn gets its funding from the government.

Meanwhile, Mr. Lockwood was jumped up last fall by essentially the same Progressive Conservative politicians from mere membership on the board to its chairmanship. This was really done to replace former chair Ken Hughes, who had quit to run in the spring of 2012 for

Premier Alison Redford’s government. Mr. Hughes was successful, by the way, and is now Ms. Redford’s energy minister. (There was also briefly an interim chair, someone named Catherine Roozen.)

The job of the board, all members of which are appointed by the government, is to set the policy of Alberta Health Services.

Therefore, as Mr. Lockwood says of the government, the same may be said of the Board: it has no business interfering in the day-to-day operations of AHS. That’s management’s job.

Let me say that again. The board of AHS has no business running the day-to-day operations of the organization, and Mr. Lockwood as the chairman has no business acting as if he is the CEO – which he appears almost every day to do by acting as the chief spokesperson for the organization and involving himself in matters as picayune as parking at individual hospitals.

That, by the way, is why it shouldn’t be a problem for the chair of the board to be a political appointee from the trucking industry, a Q.C., or both, instead of a doctor of medicine or, say, health care economics. That’s because the chair’s principal jobs are to chair board meetings and contribute to the creation of general policy at those meetings – jobs that don’t require medical or health administrative expertise.

But it’s pretty obvious that Mr. Lockwood is making CEO type decisions about daily AHS operations.

So Mr. Lockwood may be right when he suggests that, in the words of the Edmonton Journal’s reporter, “for the system to succeed, there needs to be a better separation between policy-makers and health operators.”

But he needs to remember that his job is as a policy maker, not that of a health operator, and that dictum surely ought to apply to him as well.

On the other hand, if Mr. Lockwood is acting as the CEO, we have a right as the people footing the bill for all this to wonder what we’re paying Dr. Eagle $590,000 plus bonuses to do.

And maybe it’s just me, but I keep asking myself where the heck Dr. Eagle is in all this.

I mean, seriously, can you imagine Dr. Duckett keeping his mouth shut if Mr. Hughes had tried to sideline the entire management of AHS and personally run the province’s health system. Not likely!

Beyond that, if the choice really is as Mr. Lockwood describes it, are we better off having things run by politicians who are directly accountable to us at least once in a while, or by political appointees who are not?

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Well, somebody thought there was queue jumping, that’s for sure!

by David Climenhaga on December 5, 2012 in Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics, Health Services Preferential Access Inquiry with 3 Comments

Your blogger with Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman, the former Conservative Parliamentary Secretary for Health. Below: Former Alberta Health Services CEO Stephen Duckett.

In other medical news, Alberta seems to be suffering an epidemic of mild memory loss. Not just Alberta, either. The problem has cropped up Down Under as well!

The Health Services Preferential Access Inquiry, known to most Albertans as the Queue-Jumping Inquiry or words to that effect, completed its second day in Edmonton yesterday with a couple of star witnesses on the stand – or whatever the stand called when it isn’t technically speaking at a judicial inquiry and the judge running it doesn’t actually work as a judge any more.

Answering the commission counsel’s gentle questions yesterday were former Alberta Health Services CEO Stephen Duckett, testifying by a rather disconcertingly out-of-sync video link from his office in Melbourne, Australia, a box of cookies on display behind him on the credenza; and Dr. David Megran, who once upon a time worked for Dr. Duckett and is now chief medical officer for clinical operations at AHS.

Back in 2009 before Dr. Duckett became the first health care CEO to be fired for waving a cookie at a reporter, the Australian PhD economist and Dr. Megran co-authored a memorandum that suggested the practice of queue jumping by well-connected Albertans was “not uncommon” in the province’s public health system.

This seems to have been the jumping-off point for the provincial government’s plan to hold a $10-million inquiry into lineup leapfrogging. This is odd when you think about it, because what everybody was demanding back in February 2011 was a judicial inquiry into the intimidation and bullying of health professionals. Alas, that topic is beyond the purview of this affair.

Regardless, on a couple of occasions after he was fired, one in a farewell speech to his troops in Edmonton and the other at a health care conference in Toronto, Dr. Duckett dropped the additional bombshell that there were “go-to guys” or “Mr. Fix-Its” in the system whose job it was to help MLAs get their favourite constituents discreetly moved up the waiting lists that seemed to be plaguing the health care system at the time.

But in the event, neither Dr. Megran, who testified in the morning before retired judge John Vertes, or Dr. Duckett, who testified in the afternoon (although it was still morning in Melbourne) could remember very much.

They did remember working together on the memo in May 2009, but according to the Edmonton Journal couldn’t quite recall who started the ball rolling. Dr. Megran thought Dr. Duckett asked him to write it; Dr. Duckett seemed to think Dr. Megran brought it up.

Dr. Megran said he had no knowledge whatsoever of any preferential or expedited care. He admitted it was an odd statement to make if he was not aware of the issue. But he explained that he was working many hours a week in those days. He may have “succumbed to confusion” about requests for preferential care versus common requests for information about how to navigate the health system, he said. “I don’t recollect my actual thought processes.”

Dr. Duckett indicated that while he was aware of the problem, he was never moved to ask about the names of the offending MLAs. “I wasn’t particularly interested in witch hunts.”

Moreover, Dr. Duckett remembered, he had heard a number of MLAs were unhappy about that the practice of having a go-to guy was ended, but he only heard about it from other people. “I didn’t have the names. I didn’t seek the names. What I was keen to do was stop the practice,” he explained.

Could he recall the name of any MLA, the commission’s council wondered. Well, yes! Raj Sherman.

Dr. Sherman, alert readers will recall, was then a Conservative insider. Now he is the leader of the provincial Liberal Party in the Legislature. He also has worked as an Emergency Room physician, so he’s familiar with waiting lists.

Well, Dr. Sherman told me later, he was unhappy that the go-to person for MLAs had been eliminated, but his concern had nothing at all to do with preferential treatment. “The MLAs needed a point-person to talk to, it’s true. But the issue of preferential access, that was never a focus of our concern.”

“The waiting list never came up,” he said. “The words ‘Mr. Fix-It’ never came up.”

“This is why I’ve always said this is not what this inquiry should be focused on,” said Dr. Sherman, who will testify on Dec. 13, the inquiry’s last day in Edmonton.

The inquiry will resume in Calgary in January. It is to hear today from Dr. Paul Parks, the Medicine Hat medico who in 2010 as head of the Alberta Medical Association’s emergency medicine section catalogued the shocking state of Edmonton’s University of Alberta Hospital Emergency Ward through 2008 and 2009.

So we are left with this: The practice of queue jumping was said to be deeply ingrained in the system. The memo discussed at the inquiry yesterday said to refer all requests to Dr. Duckett himself. He says he never received any requests.

So we are left to wonder: Can he really imagine the practice ended with a single memorandum?

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Everythinggate: Perfect storm lands Alberta premier in shark-infested waters!

by David Climenhaga on December 4, 2012 in Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics, Alison Redford with 2 Comments

As a perfect storm blows, Alison Redford’s strategic brain trust parries Opposition attacks about the conduct of her government. The premier is in the centre of the boat, wearing a cowboy hat. Actual Alberta politicians may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Your blogger with Paul Martin; queue-jumping inquiry chief John Vertes.

As the political gong show continued yesterday in Edmonton, it was becoming increasingly apparent Premier Alison Redford is the Paul Martin of Alberta.

Don’t scoff at this suggestion! Alert readers will recall that Mr. Martin was the last Liberal Prime Minister of Canada, the fellow whose idea of dealing with a scandal was setting up that Royal Commission led by Justice John Gomery to “get to the bottom” of things.

Well, we all know how that ended!

With Premier Redford trying vainly to put out several serious fires at the same time, it seems very much as if her political crisis-management skills, and those of her closest advisors, may be even worse than those of the unlamented Mr. Martin and his accident-prone strategy team.

Still, Premier Redford can’t be blamed completely for the timing as everything comes unraveled at once, a phenomenon known to mainstream journalists as “a perfect storm.”

Where to start? Well, the Speaker of the Alberta Legislature ruled yesterday that the Premier did not mislead the House when she told MLAs last week she had nothing to do with the appointment of her ex-husband’s law firm as part in the government’s multi-billion lawsuit against Big Tobacco, a case expected to take years and rake in millions in legal fees.

Ms. Redford told the House she’d stepped down from her job as justice minister to run for her current position when the decision was made. Memoranda produced by CBC journalists and Opposition MLAs suggested otherwise. So Wildrose House Leader Rob Anderson rose on a point of privilege in the House and accused Ms. Redford of breaking the rules by not being entirely forthright.

Speaker Gene Zwozdesky ruled yesterday in the premier’s favour – a development the Progressive Conservative government will try to pass off as a victory. But his careful explanation won’t exactly sink the Opposition’s case. “Legislatures must accept that there can be two different perspectives on the same set of facts,” the Edmonton Journal summarized. “But that does not constitute a breach of the rules or of privilege.”

And so, said Mr. Zwozdesky, “this matter is now concluded.” It is, of course, nothing of the sort.

Meanwhile, today also marked the beginning of Alberta’s long-awaited non-judicial inquiry into stuff other than physician intimidation in the province’s health care system.

When doctors and Opposition politicians started demanding a judicial inquiry back in 2010 into claims medical professionals were being bullied by influential figures tied to the government, they got instead a non-judicial investigation restricted to medical queue-jumping conducted by the Health Quality Council of Alberta, which answers to the government. John Vertes, a former judge, was asked to lead the effort.

This must’ve seemed like a pretty clever dodge to the government at the time they set it up – putting the inquiry off while things were hot with something that could be passed off as a judicial inquiry without as much risk as having a real un-retired judge looking into whatever he or she pleased.

Who would have thought the inquiry would start at the same moment as everything else was hitting the fan? It’s like … Everythinggate!

Among the witnesses scheduled to appear soon before former Justice Vertes’ $10-million investigation:

  • Former Alberta Health Services supremo Stephen Duckett, the fellow who discontinued the practice of allowing “discreet go-to guys” in the province’s health regions to help MLAs who wanted friends and constituents moved up health care waiting lists. Dr. Duckett, of course, was fired in November 2010 by Ms. Redford’s predecessor, Ed Stelmach, after an unscripted encounter with several reporters and a cookie. It’s probably safe to expect the PhD economist, who will testify from his home in Australia via video link, feels he owes nothing to the PC government.
  • Alberta Health Services VP Lynn Redford, the premier’s sister, fingered by the CBC as someone who made donations of food, supplies and booze to functions run by her sister’s political party, then successfully expensed them to her employer of the day, the Calgary Health Region. The question is likely to be asked if she was one of the go-to guys.
  • Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman, who before his reincarnation as an Opposition politician was also fired by Mr. Stelmach from his role as PC Parliamentary Secretary for Health. Dr. Sherman’s sin involved making accusations his fellow doctors were being pushed around by health bureaucrats. He too is unlikely to do the government any favours, except perhaps inadvertently.

Well, as they say in professional hockey – even when they’re not lining up for advance vaccinations during an influenza panic – timing is everything.

Given the timing of this inquiry, you can count on it that pandemonium will ensue.

Then, as if that all this were not enough, Alberta Health Services started posting all its senior executives’ expense accounts online yesterday too.

There’s probably not much there to get too excited about, else they wouldn’t be doing it. Leastways, there won’t be any more expensive bottles of wine like those successfully expensed by former AHS Chief Financial Officer Alauddin Merali back when he was CFO of Capital Health Services.

Still, one can’t shake the feeling additional mischief is sure to result once every busybody in Alberta with a blog or a Twitter account starts combing through the lists looking for something to screech about.

And those just the things that happened yesterday!

Never mind the still lingering questions about that $430,000 11th-hour election donation to Ms. Redford’s PCs from Edmonton Oilers owner Daryl Katz and all his friends and relations. That one, which was dominating the Alberta news cycle just before Halloween, is being looked into by Elections Alberta, which surely will have to report eventually too.

Oh well. Presumably the government’s strategy is for everything to have been forgotten by the time the next provincial election rolls around, unavoidably scheduled thanks to Ms. Redford’s fixed-election-period law in the spring of 2016.

The Opposition’s strategy is to allow nothing of the sort to happen, but to use the generous publicity opportunities provided by these developments and others to paint the PCs as rotten to the core every day until voting day.

Given Ms. Redford’s crisis management skills to date, one hesitates to bet against the opposition!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Why tossing Alauddin Merali under the bus may not have been a good idea

by David Climenhaga on November 21, 2012 in Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics with 3 Comments

Health Minister Fred Horne contemplates the Ghost of Firings Past. Or, wait, maybe that’s Michael Giuffre with the Ghost of Pre-Election Advertising Campaigns Past. Whatever, it’s not as grim as the Ghost of Elections Yet to Come, and players in Alberta’s health care system may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Allaudin Merali, Sheila Weatherill, Dr. Giuffre and Mr. Horne.

The Alberta Tories fired Alberta Health Services Chief Financial Officer Alauddin Merali in haste last summer when the CBC revealed he’d made extravagant expense claims in a previous job at the Capital Health Authority.

Now they can repent at leisure, since their hasty action has unexpectedly created a new and serious political crisis for them.

The firing of Mr. Merali came back to haunt the Progressive Conservative government of Premier Alison Redford because the latest senior health care executive to come under the CBC’s scrutiny for iffy expense accounts filed with a previous employer happens to be the premier’s sister.

So are the Redford Tories going to fire Lynn Redford too?

They might have to escape the political consequences of what they did to Mr. Merali – or, to be technically accurate, what they pressed Alberta Health Services management to do to him. They’re extremely unlikely to do anything of the sort, of course. If the video of their response yesterday is anything to go by, they’re going to refuse to say anything at all and bull aside anyone who gets in their way.

The CBC’s revelations last July about Mr. Merali, who had not long before been appointed Chief Financial Officer and senior VP of Alberta Health Services, was that he had made lavish expense claims back when he was CFO of Capital Health.

Outrageously lavish as some of those claims seemed, it was said here at the time Mr. Merali ought not to have been fired because all his Capital Health expenses had been properly approved, and because there was no evidence he had done anything wrong while employed by AHS.

But the embarrassment was too much for the government, and they quickly made the AHS toss him under the bus.

Now the CBC has revealed Lynn Redford also had some improper expenses while she was a senior executive with the Calgary Health Region. Today, rather like Mr. Merali was, she is a VP of AHS. Like Mr. Merali’s claims, her Calgary Health expenses were also approved by a more senior executive.

So just what are the differences in the cases, other than the obvious?

In Lynn Redford’s defence, the expenses she claimed that have been queried by the CBC are vastly lower than the approximately $350,000 expensed by Mr. Merali over three and a half years.

On the other hand, unlike Mr. Merali’s claims, some of hers appear on their face to have been illegal – public funds used as donations to her sister’s political party in violation of Alberta election financing laws enacted in 2004.

If Mr. Merali can be fired from AHS for doing nothing technically wrong in a previous job, how can Lynn Redford be kept in a similar role with the same organization for doing the same thing, and breaking the law to boot, also in a previous job?

Mr. Merali was fired from AHS on Aug. 1. That day, Chris Mazurkewich, who was acting as CEO of the province-wide health agency, said he had spoken to Mr. Merali and “we agreed that under the circumstances it would be difficult to fulfill his current role of CFO. He did have an employment contract and the employment contract has been terminated.”

The next day, Health Minister Fred Horne announced that Sheila Weatherill, who as CEO of Capital Health had approved Mr. Merali’s expenses, had offered her resignation from the AHS Board and he had accepted it.

According to Mr. Mazurkewich’s logic, can Lynn Redford now fulfill her current role as AHS’s special projects vice president? Can Patti Grier, who as a senior Calgary Health executive signed off on Lynn Redford’s expenses, continue as chief of staff and corporate secretary of AHS?

Please note that I’m not saying Ms. Redford ought to be fired. Au contraire! I am saying Mr. Merali was fired for nakedly political reasons and little moral justification.

Nor is the Opposition calling for Lynn Redford to be fired. Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith did tell reporters, though, she thought Ms. Redford ought to be required to pay the back expenses that ended up going to Tory fundraisers.

Mr. Merali, it is said here, will almost certainly succeed if he sues AHS for wrongful dismissal. He was fired for something irrelevant to the job he was kicked out of, he can likely show he didn’t do anything technically wrong anyway, and now he can also show other people who did the same thing are not treated in the same way.

If he sues and succeeds, the taxpayers of Alberta will have to pay the freight.

And if what went around has now come around and bitten the Alberta Tories on their exposed posteriors, well, it’s hard to feel much sympathy for them.

Indeed, the only person whom comes out of this whole sorry affair looking better than before is the Cookie Monster himself, Stephen Duckett.

Dr. Duckett, the first CEO of AHS, tightened up practices in the Alberta health care system to ensure there was reasonable justification for executive expense claims. It’s largely thanks to Dr. Duckett Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne can now say the problem has been fixed.

And what happened to Dr. Duckett, you ask? Oh, he was fired for political reasons too – although allegedly for being spectacularly rude to a journalist with a cookie – when he became a lightning rod for the health care failures of the same government under the previous premier, Ed Stelmach.

Cookies all ’round!

+ + +

Speaking of cookies, good luck to Alberta’s physicians, who pleaded with the government yesterday to reopen the pay negotiations Mr. Horne shut down last Friday, imposing a four-year settlement on the Alberta Medical Association and telling the docs there would be no further discussions.

Alberta Medical Association President Dr. Michael Giuffre sent a letter to the minister yesterday “calling on government to return to the negotiating table to complete an agreement with Alberta’s physicians,” as an AMA news release about the letter put it.

The tone of the letter and the news release didn’t make it sound as if the physicians are ready to acknowledge the reasons the government pulled the plug on their negotiations. They’re still demanding a compulsory arbitration process to reach a deal.

Well, who knows? Maybe Mr. Horne will take pity on them now that he’s rapped their knuckles. That might be better from the government’s perspective than having the docs still stirred up and furious the next time a provincial election rolls around in 2016.

But if he does, you can count on it he’ll want assurances from the AMA they will never do anything again like they did last April, when they bought large ads in local newspapers assailing the Conservatives and suggesting between the lines that voters elect the right-wing Wildrose Party in the election a few days later.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Cone of Silence won’t make Albertans any less angry at expense account shenanigans

by David Climenhaga on November 20, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Election Financing with 5 Comments

Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne, at right, and a representative of the media go inside the Cone of Silence to discuss the latest health care expense account revelations. Alberta politicians may not appear exactly as illustrated, but, boy, Maxwell Smart sure looks like Dalton McGuinty! Below: Premier Redford’s sister Lynn, CBC reporter Charles Rusnell and the real Mr. Horne.

Aw, geeze! Just when you thought it was safe to say something nice about Alberta’s Progressive Conservative government and bury the phrase “culture of corruption” once and for all, another shoe drops in the apartment upstairs.

This time it was yesterday’s report by CBC investigative journalist Charles Rusnell that a senior executive at the old Calgary Health Region used public money earmarked for health care to make donations to PC Party fund-raisers in the mid-2000s with more than a little help from her generous expense account.

Some of Mr. Rusnell’s previous reports, as alert readers will recall, have catalogued similar donations of public funds to the Alberta Tories from school boards, community colleges, universities and health regions – a sort of long-standing money laundering scheme in which taxpayers’ public dollars were routinely converted into private cash for partisan use.

But the really embarrassing thing about the harvest of this latest CBC Freedom of Information search is that the executive in question, one Lynn Redford, is Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s sister.

We will pause here for a moment for all Progressive Conservative supporters reading this to do the traditional palm-to-face gesture that signifies the expiration of all hope. While we wait for them to separate their fingers from their foreheads, we can ponder an interesting question: How many more well shod feet does this Tory centipede have?

According to Mr. Rusnell’s lengthy report yesterday, which shares the byline of Jennie Russell, Lynn Redford was a Calgary Health Region executive when she attended some Tory events back when Alberta still had nine geographically based health regions. These included party fund-raisers, a premier’s dinner and a golf tournament. These Progressive Conservative Party events apparently benefitted mightily from her Calgary Health expense account.

Items claimed as expenses, according to the CBC report, included “fund-raiser tickets, travel costs, mileage, hotel rooms and even more than $200 for liquor for a Tory barbeque.”

Indeed, according to the two CBC reporters, Lynn Redford also expensed a dinner with her sister, now the premier, after Alison Redford was first elected as a Calgary MLA in the 2008 Alberta election.

Alas, political contributions with public funds have been illegal since 2004.

The trouble is, as is becoming increasingly apparent, doing so was absolutely standard operating procedure and nobody even thought twice about it. Indeed, it would seem that to a degree at least this is still so, if Health Minister Fred Horne and Alberta Health Services are to be believed.

Leastways, Mr. Horne told the Edmonton Sun, “I’m not going to make any comment on past health regions. What I can tell you is we have very strict policy here at Alberta Health Services with respect to these sort of donations.” So, the past is irrelevant?

As for AHS, the Calgary Herald quotes an AHS statement saying that when Lynn Redford worked at Calgary Health expense account rules “were not well defined and were open to interpretation.” Ms. Redford was “meeting the expectations and norms at that time,” the AHS added.

This is relevant, of course, because nowadays Lynn Redford is Alberta Health Services’ vice-president of special projects. Patti Grier, the Calgary Health boss who approved her expense accounts, is now chief of staff and corporate secretary.

Which raises an interesting question. Not so long ago, Mr. Rusnell also uncovered the sorry case of Alauddin Merali, the former Capital Health Region chief financial officer who had racked up some pretty spectacular expense account claims. Mr. Merali was swiftly thrown under the bus by the Redford Government and AHS top brass, who had rehired him to do the same job for the province-wide health agency. This was despite the fact there is no evidence he ever broke the rules at Capital Health.

So why are these different former regional health executives being treated differently by the government and the AHS executive suite?

Look, this sort of thing is why cries of “culture of corruption” by the Opposition parties in the Legislature – the right-wing Wildrose Party has been loudest, but the left-leaning NDP is certainly in enthusiastic agreement – seem to be taking on increasing credibility among ordinary Albertans.

Even jaded old bloggers like this one, who have a pretty cynical view of opposition calls for inquiries, commissions and investigations, not to mention claims like those of Opposition Leader Danielle Smith that what we have here in Alberta is “a continued, systematic, systemic, institutional breach of the elections law,” are starting to feel as if there’s an actual problem.

And this perception sure as heck isn’t going to go away anytime soon just because Mr. Horne is trying to lower the Cone of Silence over it!

For one thing, while Stephen Duckett, the Australian PhD hired to run Alberta Health Services in the spring of 2009 and then fired in the fall of 2010 by then premier Ed Stelmach when he became a lightning rod for the health system’s failings, tried to clean things up, it’s far from certain the problem of officials not being able to distinguish between the public’s interests and the PC Party’s didn’t extend well beyond his purview.

For another, it’s hard to shake the feeling there’s some tit-for-tat leaking going on by former officials of both the Calgary and Capital Health Regions – you fink out our Mr. Merali, well, we’ll fink out your Ms. Redford!

So, while anything is possible in a province where voting Tory is such a deeply ingrained habit, maybe these Redford Tories are finding themselves mired deeper than they expected, and it won’t be that easy a task for them to dig themselves out.

Never mind, by the way, that these various sins took place under previous PC premiers. The sniff test has as much to do with how the government on watch when the transgressions are discovered reacts as which one was in charge when the sinning actually took place.

So what should the Tories do, assuming – as it’s presumably safe to do – they’re serious about getting re-elected in three and a half years?

Ms. Smith’s suggestion they simply throw open the expensive account records of all health regions back to 2005 is reasonable one. Why not? It was our money anyway. And if the news is bad, it’s smarter to let it all loose in one massive blast. As has been said here before, if Richard Nixon had done that, he’d likely have served out his term as U.S. president.

It sure doesn’t sound like that’s what the Redford Government has in mind, though.

Likewise, NDP MLA Rachel Notley’s call for an independent inquiry increasingly seems like an excellent way to clear the air.

Past experience with Alberta Tories and calls for wide-ranging public inquiries, though, also suggest this idea is a non-starter.

Regardless, this government needs to do something positive about the whole question of weak election financing laws from which they have benefitted for a long time but which are now weighing them down like the proverbial millstone.

That something could be a tough election financing law, fully transparent, that put meaningful limits on the amounts that could be contributed to parties and political candidates, including party leadership candidates, and controls on the ways those donations can be made, including multiple donations by corporate front groups.

Don’t hold your breath for that outcome either.

Still, these may be the only ways to lay to rest the accusations of a pervasive, embarrassing, deeply entrenched culture of political corruption here in Alberta.

If the Redford Tories don’t do something about the sense something is deeply wrong with the way elections are financed in Alberta, the stink will linger – possibly long enough to do them real harm when the next election rolls around in 2016!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Alberta’s Expensesgate scandal: Just saying it’s over doesn’t mean it’s over

by David Climenhaga on August 9, 2012 in Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics, Health Care with No comments

Transparency, Alberta style, with Gloria Stuart as Alison Redford, William Harrigan as Dr. Chris Eagle and Claude Rains as Fred Horne. Below: Don Scott, yesterday’s Invisible Man.

Alberta’s mainstream media finally got around yesterday to acknowledging the obvious, that Alberta Health Services may have left itself (and the rest of us who pay its bills) wide open to a costly lawsuit by tossing former CFO Allaudin Merali under the bus and then denying him severance without so much as a tip of the hat to due process.

In other words, to summarize the message from a law professor consulted by the Calgary Herald and an employment lawyer interviewed by the CBC, just saying the Expensesgate Scandal is over doesn’t mean it’s over.

Quoth the Herald: “Taxpayers could be left on the hook for legal costs on top of the original severance payout, warned University of Alberta faculty of law professor James Muir.”

One would like to think that AHS hasn’t just been making it up as it goes along and actually has some foundation for believing that there’s a legal way to deny Mr. Merali his severance where there’s no evidence he ever broke the rules, as ridiculous as the rules seem to have been, either when he was employed by Capital Health back in the mid-Zeros, or more recently when he worked for Alberta Health Services.

But there is no evidence of this. If you ask Alberta Health Services’ available spokespeople, they will tell you they have no idea of why the AHS Board concluded it could do what it is doing, why the government is going along with it, or what they think Mr. Merali is likely to do.

Since the Alberta government and AHS keep insisting we’re about to embark on a new era of transparency, this would seem to be an excellent first topic to be transparent about.

Indeed, just today Fort McMurray-Conklin MLA Don Scott, who is Premier Alison Redford’s “associate minister of accountability, transparency and transformation,” announced that he has been asked to lead “an initiative that will result in greater transparency on travel and expenses.” It wasn’t necessarily a promising sign – although it had a familiar Alberta ring to it – that Mr. Scott immediately made like the Invisible Man and refused to talk to the media about his new transparency plans!

Speaking of transparency, another excellent topic for some degree of translucency at least would be a clear explanation of what Health Minister Fred Horne’s work involved when he was being paid as a consultant to Capital Health in 2005.

At his news conference a week ago, the day after this embarrassing story about Mr. Merali’s expenses broke, Mr. Horne said he couldn’t recall what he and the Capital Health chief financial officer had been talking about on the occasion of their $220 dinner at Jack’s Grill in May 2005.

Fair enough, I guess, since there’s been a lot of Pouilly-Fuissé under the bridge since then. But surely Mr. Horne, who is now the MLA for Edmonton-Rutherford, can remember the general nature of the work he was doing for Capital Health, which for obvious reasons is relevant to Alberta voters in light of this month’s events.

Oddly enough, such a disclosure might well make the government and AHS both look better. Mr. Horne was, after all, legitimately employed to do something that someone thought was needed and important. Under the circumstances, a working dinner makes sense and the one he had with Mr. Merali was clearly well within the rather loosy-goosey expense account rules in place at Capital Health at the time.

While we’re still on this transparency bit, though, a related question worth asking might be the time frame when Mr. Horne worked as executive assistant to Edmonton-Whitemud MLA Dave Hancock, then the minister of advanced education and later the minister of health, and when he did his consulting work for AHS. It’s hard to imagine he did both at the same time, but the time frames set out in recent news coverage and Mr. Horne’s Wikipedia entry are confusing on this count.

Interestingly, if Mr. Merali and Mr. Horne were in the same employment relationship today as they were in 2005, they could still have dinner, but it would be a rather more Spartan affair thanks to the considerably tighter rules put in place by the frequently maligned Stephen Duckett during his tenure as supremo of Alberta Health Services.

Say what you will about Dr. Duckett, the controversial Australian PhD economist who headed AHS from the spring of 2009 until the Notorious Cookie Incident in November 2010 (when the government had realized he had become a lightning rod for public discontent with its handling of the health care system and gave him the bum’s rush), his record is not universally bad. His revised expenses policy, which is worth reading, is an example.

The system that was in place at Capital Health during Mr. Merali’s tenure there essentially allowed C-level executives to approve their own and each other’s expenses. This was the policy Sheila Weatherill, who had been the CEO of Capital Health at the time, defended as “consistent with other public sector organizations” in her resignation letter from the AHS Board a week ago, after she’d gone down as collateral damage to l’affaire Merali. The rules put in place by Dr. Duckett are much more stringent.

For example, Dr. Duckett’s exhaustive policy banned the practice of health system employees buying each other meals when they had all day in their offices to talk business – a loophole in the Capital Health rules Mr. Merali (and no doubt many others) seems to have exploited.

As for bottles of fine wine, apparently so beloved of Mr. Merali, once Dr. Duckett was at the helm … fuggetaboudit! Alcohol could not be expensed – unless, presumably, it was to be used in a ward as a disinfectant.

The worst thing about this continuing fiasco is the way it plays directly into the hands of public health care’s most determined foes, who are often members of the same group of people who contributed to the problem.

It is ironic in the extreme that the behaviour of privatization-friendly senior executives, consultants they hired and right-wing politicians that supported them – often the very same people playing a variety of different roles at different times – is now being used to make a spurious case for the replacement public health care by private, for-profit medicine.

Depend on it, if more privatization comes our way as a result of this scandal, only one thing will be better – the same executives, politicians and consultants will be able to toast their privatization successes with alcohol again.

But we taxpayers – who will still be paying for it, and paying more, plus waiting longer for care – will no longer be the wiser.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

No buyout for former Alberta Health chief financial officer? Really?

by David Climenhaga on August 6, 2012 in Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics with 8 Comments

Back in the days of Capital Health… Very little may be exactly as illustrated. Below: Dr. Chris Eagle, Alllaudin Merali, Fred Horne, Sheila Weatherill.

Alberta Health Services CEO Dr. Chris Eagle announced categorically in a news release today there will be no buyout for Allaudin Merali, the health care agency’s former chief financial officer whose controversial expense account practices in a previous job were at the centre of a storm of controversy last week.

But are we seriously expected to believe a man who would claim a single loonie plugged into a parking meter is going to say goodbye to a buyout of $500,000 without a fight?

And Mr. Merali would seem to have a case. After all, Health Minister Fred Horne got up on his hind legs in front of a room full of reporters on Thursday and stated Mr. Merali broke no rules when he filed his $346,208 in expenses to the now-defunct Capital Health Region between 2005 and 2008, the time period in which CBC investigative journalist Charles Rusnell was writing about in his shocking report.

Moreover, a glance at the expenses revealed by Mr. Rusnell on the CBC’s website suggest that while Mr. Merali’s dining habits were at once extravagant and cheap, many other expenses were legitimate by any measure.

Saying there will be no severance package for Mr. Merali may be a great way to throw a bucket of cold water on a controversy that is otherwise sure to keep smouldering for a while yet, but how is it going to save taxpayers a dime if we have to finance a long legal battle with the man that, ultimately, AHS and the taxpayers are unlikely to win?

The only way this is going to work is if Mr. Merali agrees to it. How likely is that?

If Mr. Horne had it right when he stated Mr. Merali’s 2005-2008 expenses were properly submitted in accordance with the CHR’s rules, and were duly signed off by the CHR’s chief executive, Sheila Weatherill, that would seem to make Mr. Merali’s case. Ms. Weatherill also stated in her letter when she resigned from the AHS board last week that Capital Health had in place “appropriate expenditure policies that were consistent with other public sector organizations.”

My speculation may prove to be wrong. Perhaps there is some reason Mr. Merali can be persuaded to give up half a million dollars for three months’ work that he is – on the face of it – legally entitled to demand. But it is said here this is a stalling tactic to suppress further reporting of what can only be called a scandal, and perhaps to negotiate a slightly less expensive deal with Mr. Merali if he’s prepared to take a partial payment now rather than the whole thing later.

For the time being, expect everyone involved in this fiasco to insist they can say nothing more because the matter is being investigated, or, later, before the courts.

Meanwhile, the AHS news release also said Mr. Merali’s expenses during his latest three months of employment in Alberta’s health system will be subject to an independent forensic audit.

That’s very well, but where will we be if that audit reveals Mr. Merali obeyed the new and tighter AHS rules now in place, a positive legacy of the much-maligned Stephen Duckett’s tenure as CEO, just as he is said by the health minister to have abided by the apparently more loosy-goosey rules that prevailed under Ms. Weatherill’s leadership at Capital Health?

We’ll be out the cost of the forensic audit, naturally, but Mr. Merali’s case for his buyout will have been strengthened.

Moreover, given some of the things that have been said about Mr. Merali in the past few days by some of the most powerful politicians in this province, the former CFO may well have a credible defamation case as well. He could certainly argue that his future earning capacity has been significantly reduced by things that have been said about him by politicians who cannot prove them in a court of law!

Are we taxpayers going to end up paying the potential plaintiffs’ legal expenses in a future defamation case as well?

Meanwhile, the independent forensic audit of Mr. Merali’s expenses in the past three months, since he joined AHS, will not tell us anything about what other Capital Health officials were claiming as expenses back between 2005 and 2008.

Taxpayers can rest absolutely assured, however, that Freedom of Information requests for the expense claims submitted by Ms. Weatherill and other Capital Health executives have now been filed by various news organizations. AHS may be able to stall for months, as they did with Mr. Rusnell’s original filing for Mr. Merali’s expenses, but they are unlikely to be able to stall forever.

Alberta taxpayers are not very happy with Mr. Merali’s expense accounts, that is for sure. Indeed, it has been said here before that if this had come out before the April 23 election, Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith would be premier of Alberta today.

But Albertans are less concerned with the state of a particular executive’s expense account, or what Mr. Merali and Mr. Horne had for dinner when they dined together at Jack’s Grill in 2005, than they are about the moral and ethical state of the province’s health care system.

If the rules allowed Mr. Merali’s expenses as Mr. Horne insisted last week, then it would seem that Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman has had it right all along, and that what is needed is an independent judicial inquiry into the Alberta health care system.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Understanding AHS: Carmangay nursing home repairs? We need the money for Allaudin Merali!

by David Climenhaga on August 3, 2012 in Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics with 12 Comments

Village of Carmangay: Sorry, your nursing home will have to close. Below: Former Capital Health CEO Sheila Weatherill, Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne.

Let’s cut right to the chase: If Alberta Health Services can afford to buy out Allaudin Merali, again, it can afford to keep the doors open at the Little Bow Continuing Care Centre in Carmangay.

The Little Bow centre in the village of 275 souls way down in Wildrose country is home to 18 elderly dementia patients. AHS says that at 54 years old, the building just too expensive to renovate and too rickety to keep open. Why, it would cost about a million dollars to fix the roof, make the washrooms wheelchair accessible and do the other work that’s needed!

So the place going to have to close, 36 jobs will be lost in a community that depends on them and the residents will be scattered to the four winds – or, more likely, nearby Alberta towns like Vulcan and Claresholm.

Mr. Merali, meanwhile, is the former Alberta Health Services Chief Financial Officer who got canned Wednesday afternoon when the other top execs at the massive province-wide health agency learned the CBC was about to broadcast an expose on his startling expense account practices in a previous Alberta health sector job.

Actually, CBC investigative reporter Charles Rusnell filed his Freedom of Information request back in May, so it’s hard to imagine the AHS executives and Health Minister Fred Horne haven’t known about this for a while, but never mind that just now.

An awful lot of Albertans were having trouble yesterday getting their heads around the repeated assurances by AHS and government officials that Mr. Merali didn’t actually do anything wrong when as CFO of the now-defunct Capital Health region back between 2005 and 2008 he filled out those suddenly notorious expense accounts – but that he’s now being asked to leave AHS because of it just the same.

What Mr. Merali expensed back then could be pretty startling: regular meals at luxurious restaurants that rarely seemed to cost less than $200, fine wine by the gallon, repairs to his luxury automobile, plus takeout food for meals at home, a muffin here, a can of pop there, a cuppa tea some other place – almost $350,000 worth over three years. In fairness, many of his expenses were obviously legitimate as well.

But the general attitude of tout le monde official Alberta seems to be that – so sad, too bad – under the circumstances there’s not much to do but give Mr. Merali another generous buyout, not at all dissimilar from the one he got from Alberta taxpayers when he left Capital Health when it was absorbed into AHS in May 2008. What’s more, they can’t really talk about it, because it’s a contractual matter. Lawyers, ya know…

Now, when you really think about this, it doesn’t make sense. Either Mr. Merali followed the rules – as Mr. Horne insisted at a news conference yesterday morning – in which case he should still be working for AHS. Or he didn’t, in which case he doesn’t deserve a severance package.

Either way, Alberta’s taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook for another buyout, which given Mr. Merali’s presumed salary is unlikely to be much less than half a million dollars and could theoretically be more – even though he only returned to Alberta to work for the Alberta health care system three months ago!

After his well-greased departure from Alberta in 2008, Mr. Merali travelled to a public sector job in Ontario where, lo and behold, he became involved in a public controversy about his expense account activities.

But that doesn’t seem to have been a problem when somebody in Alberta decided they wanted him back. Indeed, just before he took the AHS position, he’d been offered and briefly accepted a job as the province’s comptroller general.

Mr. Horne kept insisting at his highly unsatisfactory press conference yesterday that he would get to the bottom of all the nasty questions arising from this affair and that Albertans would soon have all the answers. But not just yet.

Indeed, at times during the news conference, Mr. Horne seemed like something astronomers might speculate about – a black hole into which information disappears and never comes out again.

“I am outraged, and the government of Alberta is outraged, by what has been revealed here,” the minister stated. But if you wanted to know, say, if Mr. Merali was expensing the same sorts of things in his new position with AHS, well, Mr. Horne didn’t have an answer to that just now. (In fact, the frequently maligned Stephen Duckett put a stop to executives expensing alcoholic beverages during his tenure as CEO of AHS, so at least Mr. Merali wasn’t expensing wine.)

Likewise, if you wanted to know why Mr. Merali was hired when he had a history of this sort of horsing around, well, the minister hadn’t known anything about that. (Apparently no one had any idea about his adventures at Capital Health until they saw the CBC request … whenever that was. Except of course, Sheila Weatherill, the former Capital Health CEO who has sat on the AHS Board since last February and thus should have been aware of the hiring. We’ll get to her in a moment.)

And if you want to know just how big Mr. Merali’s inevitable second buyout will be, well, you’ll have to be patient and wait for that too.

Indeed, if you wish to know what was discussed when Mr. Horne (then a consultant for AHS) broke bread with Mr. Merali at Jack’s Grill back in May 2005, well, Mr. Horne couldn’t recall.

But he did remember one thing – which became the main news hit of the day.

Wednesday night, he said, he got a call from Ms. Weatherill, who herself got a buyout of $1.5 million when she left Capital Health and who had approved all of Mr. Merali’s expenses back in the day. “She offered her resignation,” Mr. Horne said, “and I accepted her resignation.” Since Ms. Weatherill was a volunteer board member, at least we won’t have to cut her another cheque.

So this gets us where, exactly? As a wag of my acquaintance put it: “Health Minister Fred Horne was so outraged Sheila Weatherill authorized Allaudin Merali to spend more than $200 of taxpayers’ money in 2005 on lunch with Fred Horne, back when he was just a health policy consultant, that now he’s punishing Ms. Weatherill by forcing her off the board and using taxpayer money to write a giant cheque to Mr. Merali. This way, we can all be confident everyone has learned their lesson!”

When the dust settles, we’ll have spent about a million dollars in less than five years just getting rid of the same extravagant guy, twice.

But we can’t afford to spend the same amount to keep a residence for vulnerable seniors open in Carmangay!

What’s wrong with this picture?

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Some Alberta seniors will soon be eating better meals – they can thank the union for them

by David Climenhaga on July 27, 2012 in Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics, Labour, Media with 4 Comments

AUPE’s powerful viral video on the unappetizing 21-day menu. Below: Former Alberta Health Services CEO Stephen Duckett, Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne.

One of the least successful experiments of the short, unhappy reign of Stephen Duckett as CEO of Alberta Health Services was the so-called 21-day menu, the unpalatable tinfoil- and plastic-wrapped meals that were trucked in, reheated and fed to helpless residents.

Cooks who once prepared nutritious and more appetizing meals at more than 70 public long-term care facilities around the province were let go or assigned to other duties.

The TV dinner-style meals were hauled in by reefer truck from factories in faraway places like Ontario and Pennsylvania, just in case you were wondering if they came from a nearby, centralized kitchen.

Dr. Duckett’s idea when he championed this scheme was apparently that it would save money. Whichever senior manager did the cost estimates for the Australian PhD economist, who was fired by the government in November 2010 after the Notorious Cookie Incident, must’ve used a wonky calculator. If the scuttlebutt is to be believed, it ended up costing about 6 per cent more.

The packaged menu was recycled every 21 days – hence the name – although, a lot of it was recycled in the conventional sense a lot more frequently than that, because residents couldn’t bear to choke down their sickening meals and the leftovers went straight into the recycling bin out back.

Now the Alberta Government has announced that – rather like Dr. Duckett himself – the 21-day menu has passed its best-before date, at least in Alberta’s long-term care facilities.

In a terse news release that never mentioned the term “21-day menu,” Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne said yesterday he has directed AHS “to discontinue the practice of preparing meals offsite and reheating, and bring back on-site food preparation services in the long-term care facilities it operates.”

There will be rejoicing in nursing homes throughout Alberta, and rightly so.

And good for Mr. Horne for making this decision – it likely took some courage on his part to overcome bureaucratic inertia within his department and the monolithic province-wide health authority. Mr. Horne said in the release that a plan must be given to him by October, and it must be put into in operation at 73 facilities by December. That should mean decent meals are again being served to approximately 2,700 residents by Christmastime.

But while you’re cheering, don’t forget that this never would have happened without the efforts of a labour union – the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, which represented the small group of cooks directly affected by this foolish policy.

AUPE put a lot of effort into fighting the 21-day menu, even though it didn’t really have a lot to gain from it – after all, the number of AUPE members affected was a drop in the bucket out of the union’s close to 90,000 members. What’s more, only a few actually lost their jobs. If AUPE gets any additional members because of today’s decision, it’ll probably be fewer than a dozen.

While it’s all very well to say that residents and their families raised a ruckus about these inedible meals – they screamed bloody murder, as a matter of fact – it’s said here they would have been ignored if it hadn’t been for the ability of AUPE to take collective action on behalf of its members, and on behalf of the rest of us.

Working with a Calgary-based advertising agency called Scout Communications, which does a lot of work for unions, AUPE created a documentary video that explained in terms anyone could understand why the meals were so bad, and what needed to be done about them. That video had enormous impact when it went viral on the Internet.

It was obvious AUPE and Scout had created something really remarkable when the video started showing up on right-wing websites, being distributed virally by Canadians (and some Americans too) all across the political spectrum and even became the topic of a Wildrose Party press release calling on the government to re-hire local cooks at these facilities.

Wherever that video appeared, it was accompanied by statements like these, picked off a social media site at random:

  • “The food at the Bashaw long care is gross. Trucked in ,reheated and fed to the residents if they can choke it down. If not they go hungry and the slop is thrown in the garbage.”
  • “Who came up with this idea they should have to eat it, All these people have to look forward to is a good meal with good smells how dare you take that away from them and then not listen to the people who are dealing withit every day. Shame on you as a government.”
  • “This vidio should be aired on all the TV networks several times to make sure everybody sees it. Maybe a HUGE public outcry would change some poiicy. Then again I believe the PC party could care less.”

I’m sure readers will pardon the errors of spelling, punctuation and grammar. This stuff comes straight from the heart.

Pretty soon a local broadcaster got into the act, asking its food reviewers to rate the 21-day meals (two thumbs down!) and making fun of the government.

It was that kind of response to the AUPE video, let it be said, that lit the fire under the government – the heat from which led directly to Mr. Horne’s announcement yesterday.

Remember this when right-wing think-tanks, on-air bloviators and market-fundamentalist political parties like the Ontario Conservatives, led by former Wal-Mart manager Tim Hudak, talk about restricting the ability of unions to do anything but negotiate contracts, and to tie their hands so they can’t do that very well. This is precisely the kind of thing they’re trying to stop.

These well-funded corporate-backed groups will tell you they’re just supporting “worker choice,” “the right to work” and an end to “forced union dues.” This is all hot air. They want to make it impossible for working people to act collectively, in their workplaces and outside of them, because they see that as being to their political and financial advantage. When people like the Fraser Institute say they are only worrying about your rights – watch out!

Perhaps this is why Lorne Gunter, the far-right Sun Media columnist and longtime friend of the Fraser Institute, launched an attack on AUPE last night, posted to the Suns’ websites about eight hours after Mr. Horne’s announcement. Or perhaps it was merely a coincidence and yesterday was chosen for some other reason for the old climate change denier to start reciting old-fashioned market fundamentalist bromides about unions in general and AUPE in particular.

Regardless, everyone is going to say they’re delighted by Mr. Horne’s decision yesterday – but, behind the scenes, a lot of far-right ideologues are going to find this decision very tough to swallow and will be vowing revenge on AUPE.

One way they’ll try to get it – as in Mr. Gunter’s screed – will be to encourage more private sector, for-profit nursing homes, and fewer facilities like the 73 under AHS control. That’s a topic for another day.

In the mean time, let’s celebrate this small victory. Here’s to decent food for seniors. As Mr. Horne said, “They deserve to live in comfort and dignity and enjoy food that is not only nutritious, but looks and tastes home-cooked and satisfies cultural food preferences.”

And here’s to AUPE for making it happen.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca. Just so you read it here first, David Climenhaga once worked for AUPE. He no longer does.

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