Thomas Lukaszuk, former deputy premier, files Law Society complaint against Alberta justice minister

‘It’s unprecedented for government to retain a lawyer who is to advise employees who are to testify against the government’

Former Alberta deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk, who filed a complaint about Justice Minister Mickey Amery with the Alberta Law Society yesterday (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

Former Conservative deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk has filed a complaint with the Alberta Law Society against Justice Minister Mickey Amery and the lawyer engaged by the provincial government to talk to Health Department and Alberta Health Services employees who are contacted by staff from the office of the Auditor General.

Mr. Lukaszuk said on social media yesterday afternoon that he had filed the Law Society complaint in connection with the two lawyers’ roles in the government’s response to the auditor general’s investigation of controversial contracts with private-sector surgery providers.

Mr. Lukaszuk indicated in a telephone conversation that he expects to contact the RCMP today regarding the same matter.

Readers will recall the widespread astonishment and concern the week before last when the NDP Opposition published a leaked email from an assistant deputy minister of health instructing thousands of public employees directing any of them contacted for an interview by the Office of the Auditor General to “please redirect the OAG to our legal counsel Rose LLP.”

“This should be done by email with a copy to me to (sic) and our legal counsel Matt Lindsey at Rose LLP,” the ADM wrote in the email, misspelling Mr. Lindsay’s family name. The email, which was leaked to the Opposition NDP, even included a template for a reply telling the AG’s staff to contact Mr. Lindsay “to coordinate your request.”

However, while Premier Danielle Smith and Health Minister Adrianna LaGrange described the lawyer’s role as just an effort to help the AG’s staff, a statement from the Office of the Auditor General said “this is not a standard practice our office typically encounters in the course of its work.”

As a result, the email was widely perceived as an effort by the government to attempt to intimidate government employees not to reveal what they might know about the controversial contracts, which were alleged by fired AHS CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos to have been pushed on the health care agency by senior government staffers with close ties to Premier Danielle Smith.

“It’s unprecedented for government to retain a lawyer who is to advise employees who are to testify against the government,” Mr. Lukaszuk told me.

And he is, after all, not just some guy who wandered in off the street with a strong opinion.

In addition to serving as deputy premier in the government of Alison Redford, Mr. Lukaszuk, who was MLA for Edmonton Castle Downs from 2001 to 2015, was employment minister in premier Ed Stelmach’s and Ms. Redford’s cabinets, minister of advanced education, and minister of labour. So he is not someone unfamiliar with the workings of parliamentary government or cabinet, and his involvement is likely to set the cat among the pigeons, as they say, in Ms. Smith’s United Conservative Party Government.

Government employees, Mr. Lukaszuk said “can just go to the auditor general or to RCMP or to that judge and testify without disclosing it, without any legal advice. They’re not accused of anything. They’re just witnesses that are coming forward with information.”

“I don’t know about other jurisdictions, but it would have caught the media’s attention, and I never read anything (about) such things,” Mr. Lukaszuk continued. “I can tell you, in the Government of Alberta, it’s unprecedented where the minister or the department would hire a lawyer to advise employees on how to testify or not testify against the employer.

“These employees don’t need a lawyer to begin with, but if they feel like they need a lawyer, they can retain their own lawyer, right? Or they can go to their union and ask the union to retain a lawyer for them. … But not the party that is investigated being the employer.”

“They can just go to auditor general or to RCMP or to that judge and testify without disclosing it, without any legal advice. They’re not accused of anything. They’re just witnesses that are coming forward with information.”

The actions of the government in this case mean we now have “a situation where witnesses who possibly could be testifying against their own employer, being the Government of Alberta, are directed to meet and seek assistance from a lawyer retained by the Government of Alberta and their employer.”

“Mickey Amery is involved, because Mickey, as Minister of Justice, is legal counsel to cabinet. Alberta Health Services is no longer an independent agency because it doesn’t have a CEO and it doesn’t have a board. It is directly run by the Deputy Minister of Health, who reports to the Minister of Health, and is under the advisement of Mickey Amery. And Mickey Amery has been publicly defending this.”

Meanwhile, judging from the photos she has been tweeting from Japan, Premier Smith appears to be having a fine time spending constituency week meeting Japanese prefectural officials on her Asian tour, far from impertinent reporters asking inconvenient questions about the latest developments in the health care contracts controversy.

While Japanese prefectures like that of Hokkaido, which Ms. Smith visited yesterday, have elected governments, unlike Canadian provincial governments they have no sovereign functions separate from the unitary national government. So when the premier’s staff describes them as provinces, they are making them seem a little more important than they really are.