From edmontonjournal.com

Health Minister Sarah Hoffman defended her government’s handling of AHS matters Wednesday as “doing our job” — not political interference, as the agency’s former chief executive officer wrote in a scathing resignation letter. 

“Public health care is public business and I’m very proud of the fact that we have a government that believes that,” Hoffman told reporters. 

Opposition critics panned the government’s “meddling” in the arm’s-length organization and said a dysfunctional relationship between the AHS board and the health ministry should be fixed.

The health authority has had eight CEOs since it was formed in 2008. The search continues to replace the most recent boss, Vicki Kaminski, who publicly claimed her resignation was a “personal decision” last November. She left in January.

But in her resignation letter, Kaminski said she left halfway through her contract, which paid a base salary of $540,000 a year, because of the NDP government’s “troubling” practice of micro-managing and second-guessing her decisions and administration. 

According to the letter, obtained by CBC News, Kaminski wrote to the new AHS board that she felt the government’s heavy-handedness was putting her professional reputation in jeopardy.

“There are many examples of how this has played out over the past several months,” she wrote in the letter, according to CBC. “Some of the examples transcend both the former government and the newly elected government of Alberta.

“More recently however, many (examples of political interference) are simply rooted in an ideology of the new government that does not allow AHS to do what needs to be, and should be done,” Kaminski wrote. 

Hoffman said Wednesday her job is to talk to the AHS board about policy direction so they can take the appropriate administrative action. 

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