A year after hiring a lobbying firm with close ties to the governing UCP to advocate on its behalf, Shoppers Drug Mart scored a $2.5-million agreement with Alberta Health Services (AHS) to provide mandatory COVID-19 tests for international travellers.
One of the AHS officials who signed off on that agreement is Blayne Iskiw, a director and shareholder of a company at the centre of allegations that the UCP government pressured AHS to accept inflated contracts to operate chartered surgical facilities.
“We are seeing an expansion of relationships between the private sector and the public sector in health,” Lorian Hardcastle, an expert in health law at the University of Calgary, told the Progress Report.
“If that is going to continue, which I think is likely under the current government, we need to be thoughtful around things like transparency of contracting, financial conflicts of interest, lobbying, and how that plays out in terms of who gets contracts, and value for money.”
Then-premier Jason Kenney makes an announcement outside an Edmonton Shoppers Drug Mart in March 2021. (Flickr)
In December 2019, Shoppers registered to lobby the provincial government, including AHS, Alberta Health, and the Premier, through Wellington Advocacy. That firm was founded by Nick Koolsbergen, then-premier Jason Kenney’s former campaign director, who is listed as the designated lobbyist on the file.
Koolsbergen continues to lobby the government on Shoppers’ behalf, registering as recently as December 2024, in part to “share details and raise awareness on an ongoing basis of the services offered in Alberta by Shoppers Drug Mart and Loblaw Companies Limited.”
All the other Wellington lobbyists on the most recent filing for Shoppers have deep UCP ties—Brad Tennant is the party’s former executive director, Clancy Bouwman is Kenney’s former assistant, and Peter Csillag, Lucas Robertson and Ashley Wilde are all former party staffers.
Chris Gallaway, executive director of the advocacy group Friends of Medicare, told the Report that there’s “a pattern of behavior with this government that seems determined to allow Loblaws and Shoppers Drug Mart into as much of the health-care system as they can, and giving them public health-care dollars to do it.”
The Report previously detailed how employees at two Edmonton mental health clinics were pressured by management to obtain patients’ consent to transfer their prescriptions over to Shoppers. This outlet filed a freedom of information request for all contracts AHS has signed with Shoppers, or its parent company, Loblaw.
The COVID-19-19 testing contract, entered into in November 2020, was a sole-source contract with Shoppers for $2.5 million in the 2020/21 fiscal year, according to the AHS sole-source contract database. A contract that size needs to receive an approved procurement exception from AHS, which was granted under “emergent supply,” meaning a situation of unforeseen urgency—like a global pandemic.
The deal was for Shoppers to conduct COVID-19 tests as part of the government’s Inbound Traveller Testing COVID-19-19 Testing Program, which required travellers to receive a COVID-19 test upon arrival at the airport, and then another test six or seven days later.
Shoppers was contracted to provide follow-up tests for travellers who are asymptomatic with kits provided by AHS, billing AHS $42 per COVID-19 test for up to 52,000 tests, a price which Hardcastle, the UCalgary professor, described as “lucrative.”
“It isn't clear how they arrived at that number, because the supplies were being provided to them,” Hardcastle said.
Under the Alberta Medical Association’s fee schedule, doctors charge AHS $25 for providing a COVID-19 vaccination. Hardcastle said this would take about the same amount of time, if not more, than the COVID-19 tests AHS was paying $42 for.
Friends of Medicare’s Gallaway said there’s no reason “to be signing contracts with Shoppers Drug Mart to do these tests.”
“We should be using our lab system that already exists and not paying off a markup to a private, huge, private corporation to make money off of our public health care,” he said.
The CorruptCare Connection
The contract is signed by then-AHS executive director, strategic contracting Blayne Iskiw, who Globe and Mail reported is a voting shareholder and director of two numbered companies that have proposed operating private surgical facilities in Red Deer and Lethbridge, with hip, knee and shoulder procedures costing on average more than double the prices for the same procedures at an equivalent facility in Calgary.
Days after leaving AHS in November 2022, Iskiw accepted a job with MHCare, a medical supplies company that helped broker a $70-million contract to import children’s pain medication from Turkey. MHCare CEO Sam Mraiche owns 25 per cent of shares in each of the numbered companies, the Globe reported.
Former AHS CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos has alleged in a lawsuit that she was pressured by the premier’s former chief of staff, Marshall Smith, to approve the Alberta Surgical Group proposals, despite the proposed contracts being overpriced. Her allegations, which the NDP have dubbed the “CorruptCare Scandal,” haven’t been proven in court, Smith denies he had any say in the matter and MHCare denies any allegations of wrongdoing.
Reached by email, Iskiw declined the Progress Report’s request for an interview about the Shoppers contract, noting that he no longer works at AHS.
“You would need to reach out to them for any comment regarding the arrangement,” he added.
AHS did not acknowledge a request for comment.
CORRECTION: The first-published version of this story incorrectly identified the two numbered companies at which Iskiw is a director as owners of the Alberta Surgical Group (ASG). These companies do not have a business relationship with ASG that we could verify. We apologize for the error.