What was tabled, and what wasn't.

According to Guthrie's handwritten notes from the Health Cabinet Committee meeting of January 30, 2025, Minister LaGrange asked the committee to dismiss the AHS board on the basis that the board was "holding up the implementation" of Acute Care Alberta. Guthrie's notes record what was — and what was not — said in that meeting.

What the notes record was not raised in the meeting

• No mention of the AHS investigation already underway into questionable contracts with private surgical facilities.
• No reference to former AHS chief executive Athana Mentzelopoulos's January 20, 2025 letter, which contained allegations of political interference in procurement.
• No indication that the Auditor General had been notified.
• An AHS board member's account of the same events, provided to Guthrie afterward, contradicted the Minister's stated reason for the dismissal.

Guthrie wrote, in the letter to the Auditor General, that the contradiction gave him “enough reason to cast significant doubt on (LaGrange's) judgment here.”

I tried to work within the system to shine a light on the issues, but the government wasn't interested in hearing it… Overall, the sentiment in the room was that I was fabricating a problem where none existed and behaving like a conspiracy theorist. — Peter Guthrie, in a letter to the Auditor General, tabled in the Legislature April 30, 2025

The government's response, on the record

In Question Period the day after the tabling, Premier Smith stated: "No one was misled." Health Minister LaGrange called Guthrie "misguided, misinformed and misinterpreted." The Premier's press secretary stated that any accusation that political staff or the Minister had withheld information was "absolutely false."

What none of those responses claimed is that Guthrie's notes were inauthentic. They are the contemporaneous record of a sitting cabinet minister, made at the meeting in question, and tabled by him in the Legislative Assembly. The Premier disputes the conclusion drawn from the notes; she does not dispute the notes.

A document tabled in the Legislative Assembly becomes part of the permanent public record. It cannot be retracted by the government; it cannot be redacted after the fact; it cannot be unsealed because it was never sealed. The Speaker accepts the tabling, the document is recorded in Hansard indices, and it is preserved by the Legislative Library.

The mechanism exists for exactly this purpose: to permit a member — including a member who is no longer in cabinet, no longer in caucus, and no longer welcome in government communications — to put a document into the record where the government cannot remove it. That is the procedure that produced the documents on this page.

The substance of the allegations will be evaluated by the Auditor General, by any subsequent independent review, and ultimately by Albertans. The procedural fact is settled: the documents are tabled, and they say what they say.

The trip's existence is not in dispute. The Premier's office confirmed it. The means of travel is not in dispute. The Premier's office confirmed that as well. What is at issue is the chain of decisions that placed the head of a Canadian provincial government on a private aircraft paid for by a foreign sovereign — and what was disclosed, when, and to whom.

What the public record establishes

• The Premier left Calgary on the afternoon of October 27, 2025 — the day Bill 2 was tabled and passed under the notwithstanding clause.
• Her government later confirmed the travel was by private jet provided at the expense of the Saudi government.
• The disclosure of the means of travel did not accompany the trip itself; it followed media inquiries.
• The trip itinerary included Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

I have a lot of thoughts about the fact that the premier of this province who invoked a bill to take away the rights of citizens of this province didn't even have the decency to be in the legislature. She should have looked in the eyes of the teachers who were in the galleries. — Jason Schilling, ATA president, October 28, 2025 — "a fundamentally disgraceful thing"

Schilling's quotation has been carried by Global News, CBC, and the Canadian Press. Amnesty International Canada subsequently condemned Bill 2 as a violation of teachers' rights to bargain collectively, to freedom of expression, and to freedom of association. The notwithstanding clause overrides Charter protections for up to five years; in this case it bars the ATA from any constitutional challenge to the bill's terms.

The Office of the Ethics Commissioner of Alberta is independent of cabinet and reports to the Legislative Assembly. Where a Commissioner reviews a matter involving a member of the Executive Council, the relevant correspondence between the member and the Commissioner is the kind of document a government with nothing to hide tables on request. Premier Smith has, on two occasions, been asked in the Legislature to table the correspondence between her office and the Ethics Commissioner concerning the Saudi flight. She has declined both times.

What the public record contains is therefore: the trip, confirmed; the host, confirmed; the means of travel, confirmed; and a procedural refusal to make the related ethics correspondence part of the public record. The refusal is not, on its own, evidence of impropriety. It is a fact about what is and isn't on file.