News/Canada/Edmonton

The Alberta government introduced its long-promised and controversial bill on Tuesday to force people with severe substance addictions into involuntary treatment. Bill 53, the Compassionate Intervention Act, lays out the criteria, guidelines and process for a family member or guardian, health-care professional or police officer to get someone into treatment."This program is not for the vast majority of Albertans who suffer from addiction," Dan Williams, Alberta's minister of mental health and addiction, told a news conference in Edmonton."This program is also not a criminal justice program. This is a health-care program … health care should lead to healing, and not harming those who suffer from addiction."The government intends to start opening compassionate intervention beds in existing f...

A Court of King's Bench judge has reserved her decision on the province's request to compel the former CEO of Alberta Health Services to delete work emails she sent to her private account the day before she was fired.Lawyers representing the Alberta government and Alberta Health Services argued in an Edmonton courtroom Friday that the nine emails they know about contain confidential information that belongs to AHS. They are seeking an injunction against Athana Mentzelopoulos from sharing the material. The government also wants the court to compel Mentzelopoulos to face cross-examination by its lawyers to find out who she has already sent that information to. Mentzelopoulos's lawyer Dan Scott called such an exercise, "a fishing expedition."The injunction request is tied to a wrongful dismis...

Alberta's government will soon tie public hospital funding to the number and type of procedures performed, a move critics warn won't improve the public system and will only accelerate private delivery.Premier Danielle Smith said Monday the new "activity-based" model, expected to be implemented for some surgeries in 2026, will drive costs down by fostering competition among public and private providers who will be rewarded for delivering better results."The old top-down approach offers no incentive to do more for patients and limits our ability to direct dollars where they can get the best results," Smith said."The problem here is [that] hospitals miss their target and there's no accountability because they've already got the pot of money."Smith said in publicly funded, privately run surgic...

The overdose prevention site in Red Deer will be closing at the end of the month, following a decision by a judge released Wednesday. Justice C.A. Rickards of Court of King's Bench denied a request by Aaron Brown, a man with opioid use disorder, to keep the OPS open beyond March 31. In January, a different judge granted an interim injunction to continue being open around the clock until the end of March. The government was planning to phase out the site and had already cut operating hours to 12 hours a day. Brown argued that the OPS closure would violate his Charter rights. The judge said in his decision that while Brown had visited the site four times between October and January, he has continued to use drugs three times a day, and said he "cannot conclude that there is a real probability...

Confirmed measles cases in the Edmonton region have public health officials issuing a warning about the potential risk of exposure. In a public health advisory issued late Sunday, Alberta Health Services said cases have been confirmed in the Edmonton region, including two instances when the highly contagious disease could have spread to others at local medical facilities.The advisory said people who were at the Stollery Children's Hospital's emergency department between March 14 at 10 p.m. and March 15 at 12:30 a.m. may have been exposed.Anyone who was at the Belle Rive Medicentres Family Health Care Clinic in northeast Edmonton on March 12 between 2:15 p.m. and about 5:15 p.m. is also at risk of exposure, Alberta Health Services cautioned. The advisory is the latest in a string of public ...

When Alberta's United Conservative government contracted out community medical lab testing to a private company in December 2022, it said it would save tens of millions of dollars.Two weeks before that contract with DynaLife Medical Labs was set to take effect, the company told the province it needed additional funding.Less than three months later, DynaLife's owners said the company was insolvent and needed an additional $70 million. They soon asked the province to buy DynaLife, which it ultimately did at a cost of almost $100 million.These revelations come from documents obtained by CBC News through freedom of information requests, including Alberta Health emails and briefing notes prepared for Premier Danielle Smith and health ministers Jason Copping and Adriana LaGrange.The documents fi...

Alberta Health Services alleges the wrongful dismissal suit of the organization's former CEO is "groundless" and an attempt to extract a larger severance payment.In a statement of defence filed Friday in Edmonton's Court of King's Bench, the provincial health agency says it terminated former CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos because she wasn't fulfilling her duties.The claim says Mentzelopoulos's lawsuit in response to her January termination is "ill-founded, groundless and vexatious."Mentzelopoulos, a former Alberta government employee who has served as deputy minister of finance, filed the suit against AHS and Health Minister Adriana LaGrange last month.She claims she was fired two days before she was scheduled to meet with Alberta's auditor general about surgical contracts she says had links to...

Health Minister Adriana LaGrange is alleging the former CEO of Alberta Health Services was unwilling and unable to implement the government's plan to break up the health authority,  became "infatuated" with her internal investigation into private surgical contracts and made "incendiary and inaccurate allegations about political intrigue and impropriety" before she was fired in January. The claims are contained in the minister's statement of defence filed Thursday in Edmonton Court of King's Bench.The document denies allegations made by Athana Mentzelopoulos, the former CEO, who filed a $1.7 million wrongful dismissal lawsuit against LaGrange and Alberta Health Services last month. The claim, which contains allegations of political interference from a staff member in the office of Premier D...

The Alberta government wants to cut more than $400 million in the fees it pays to doctors, according to a confidential memo obtained by The Canadian Press.The Feb. 18 memo, sent by Alberta Medical Association head Dr. Shelley Duggan to member physicians, says Alberta's health ministry seeks cuts to more than 800 physician billing codes to save $400 million because of budget pressures.Those codes lay out how much money is paid for specific procedures, sometimes based on the amount of time that a doctor spends with a patient."What has become clear in the last few months is that Alberta Health is looking to address its budget shortfalls through the physician services budget," Duggan writes."While we hope Alberta Health will reconsider its current approach, we wanted to advise members that it'...

Alberta RCMP have launched an investigation into Alberta Health Services (AHS) and the allegations of political interference and potential conflicts of interest within its procurement practices.In a statement Thursday, RCMP confirmed that the preliminary review of a complaint received on Feb. 6 has now moved into a formal investigation."Following a review, the RCMP has begun an investigation into the matter. As this is an ongoing investigation, no further details are available at this time," the statement said.On Feb. 12, the former CEO of the provincial health authority, Athana Mentzelopoulos, filed a $1.7-million wrongful dismissal lawsuit against AHS and the province.In her claim, Mentzelopoulos alleged she was fired in part because she'd launched an investigation and forensic audit int...