Year in Review: Corruption, confusion and contagion – 2025 a landmark year for Alberta health

By ZOE MASON on December 23, 2025.

zmason@medicinehatnews.com

It has been a historic year of upheaval for health care in Alberta.

The system-wide overhaul the province dubbed a ‘health-care refocusing’ was announced in 2023 and began in 2024, but 2025 was the year organizational changes came to fruition.

Between the changing face of health care in the province, high-profile inquiries into service delivery and a resurgence of a long-dormant contagious disease, 2025 was a year Albertans will not soon forget.

It began with scandal.

On Jan. 8, Alberta Health Services CEO Athena Mentzelopoulos was fired. She filed a wrongful dismissal lawsuit in February alleging she was terminated for investigating contracts linked to government officials. The UCP government maintains that Mentzelopoulos’s claims are unfounded, and that the former CEO was fired due to obstruction of health-care reforms.

Mentzelopoulos’s allegations sparked several investigations, including one by a former judge in Manitoba contracted by the government, one by the RCMP and one by the province’s auditor general.

The latter investigations have not yet released findings.

The independent investigation by former Chief Judge of the Provincial Court of Manitoba Raymond Wyant released its results in October. Wyant’s report found AHS did not abide by its policies regarding procurement and that several employees acted in conflict of interest.

Wyant found the province had spent nearly $50 million on dubious contracts for children’s pain medication in which the product was never received.

Wyant also highlighted the challenges faced by his investigation, which included the inability to subpoena witnesses to testify under oath or compel the presentation of documents. Key government officials, including Premier Danielle Smith and then Minister of Health Adriana LaGrange, did not testify in the report.

While the health-care system faced scrutiny amid the conflict of interest scandal, it was also undergoing a dramatic structural transformation as the government’s planned refocusing took shape this year.

In January, the government announced the establishment of Assisted Living Alberta, the fourth and final health agency to inherit what was once under the umbrella of AHS.

Recovery Alberta had already been launched in fall 2024. Primary Care Alberta became fully operational in February, and Acute Care Alberta became operational in the spring, inheriting responsibility for Emergency Health Services in April.

On May 16, a major cabinet shuffle revealed the new ministerial structure of Alberta’s health leadership, with four ministers responsible for the four pillars of the new system.

The confusion that followed among providers, patients and seemingly the ministers themselves was immediate and widespread.

Staff who had worked for AHS were gradually relocated into one of the four new agencies. Doctors were unclear on which agency was now responsible for their oversight.

It is often unclear where responsibility for a given problem, or purported solution, lies. Media requests are passed around between press secretaries. Answers from ministers are occasionally contradictory, with more than one claiming authority over a given area.

Answers about workforce planning, for example, seem impossible to find. A committee that Primary and Preventative Health Services pointed to as the body responsible for co-ordinating between pillars and industry partners appears not to exist. At the very least, it leaves no footprint, and none of the supposed industry partners have been invited to participate.

In a recent example of confusion resulting from the restructuring, by December, the News was still receiving communications that bear the AHS insignia for public health notices about virus outbreaks, even though AHS has ostensibly been reduced to a hospital service provider. A former AHS communications officer (now at Recovery Alberta) informed the News that further information would be available by reaching out to Primary Care Alberta.

Critics have slammed the refocusing for introducing chaos to a system that was already struggling beneath the strain of workforce shortages.

The shortage of health-care professionals affecting jurisdictions around the world is especially acute in Alberta. While estimates vary, it is clear more than 700,000 Albertans remain without a family doctor in 2025.

Major structural changes to health-care delivery and funding were also tabled in the two sittings of the legislature, setting the stage for further seismic shifts to come.

In the fall session of the legislature, health was a major focus area for new policy. Fall session bills introduced further structural changes that invite more privatization into the province’s health-care delivery. Legislation passed this session will enable doctors in the province to practise simultaneously in both the public and private systems, and elect to undergo private diagnostic screenings without a medical requisition.

The government also used the notwithstanding clause to shield from legal challenges new laws restricting the ability of doctors to provide gender-affirming care like puberty blockers and hormone therapy to children under the age of 16.

Doctors testify that puberty blockers have no long-term effects on fertility, contesting a popular justification invoked by the UCP government. The Canadian Medical Association, which led the constitutional challenge that stalled Bill 9 in courts, has called the use of the notwithstanding clause an infringement on a physician’s freedom of conscience and an interference in the doctor-patient relationship.

While the province’s health-care system underwent a major transformation, Alberta was also the epicentre of a national health crisis. A measles outbreak brought the once-defunct disease roaring back to the centre of Canadian public health discourse and costing the country its elimination status, which it had held since 1998.

The Pan-American Health Organization revoked Canada’s status in November after a nationwide outbreak infected more than 5,000 people.

Alberta emerged as one of the epicentres of the outbreak, with nearly 2,000 confirmed cases in the province as of Dec. 6. Alberta’s infections represent 37 per cent of Canada’s measles cases this year, although Alberta’s population makes up only 12 per cent of Canada.

Alberta alone had more measles cases in 2025 than the entirety of the United States.

One of the two measles deaths recorded this year also occurred in Alberta when a baby born pre-term with a congenital case died in October.

The vast majority of cases in Alberta were contracted by unvaccinated people.

In a statement released following the loss of elimination status, the Alberta Medical Association released a statement blamed poor public health leadership for the outbreak.

“This is the result of persistent misinformation and disinformation that continue to undermine public confidence in vaccines,” reads the statement. “Too many people are being targeted with false claims, leading to vaccine hesitancy and dangerously low immunization rates.”

Provincial health analytics from 2024 showed Alberta’s vaccination rates for measles hovering around 68 per cent for children aged 2 – well below the 95 per cent needed for herd immunity.

Smith told reporters in November that her government had rolled out a vaccination campaign in areas with historically low immunization rates, and seen reasonable success, with some communities increasing uptake by 50 per cent.

Still, Canada can’t regain the elimination status it lost this fall until it can demonstrate that transmission has been interrupted for at least a year.

None of these issues is resolved heading into 2026.

In the new year, Albertans can expect the results of the other two inquiries into the conflicts of interest allegations at AHS, as well as the rollout of further changes to the health-care system, including hospital-based leadership and an activity-based funding model for select acute care procedures.

40
-39