Alberta Health Services and the provincial government have been ordered to disclose more records about former AHS chief executive Athana Mentzelopoulos’s job performance as a document dispute continues in her wrongful dismissal lawsuit, CBC News reports.

In a late-October ruling, Justice Michael Lema gave AHS and the province until Nov. 28 to provide records concerning performance assessments, concerns about her work and any warnings she received before being fired, according to reporting by CBC’s Joel Dryden.

The disclosure fight is also before the Alberta Court of Appeal. After Lema refused a provincial request to pause document production pending an appeal, Court of Appeal Justice Anne Kirker granted the government a pause until a Nov. 19 hearing, with the consent of Mentzelopoulos’s legal team.

Mentzelopoulos filed her lawsuit in February 2025, alleging she was dismissed after launching an investigation into contracts and AHS procurement practices. AHS said in its defence that she was terminated because she was not fulfilling her duties. None of the allegations have been tested in court.

The dispute involves records moving in both directions. Lema recently ordered Mentzelopoulos to return documents she emailed herself before her dismissal. She argued she needed to retain them to act as a whistleblower; lawyers for AHS and the government said her contract required their return. The judge noted she could seek those records through the normal court process.

Separately, Lema ordered AHS and the province to disclose documents to address gaps in their production. His latest ruling included records relevant to whether Mentzelopoulos was warned about alleged performance problems.

Employment lawyer Carter Greschner, who teaches at the University of Alberta, told CBC that a duty to warn involves clearly identifying concerns, setting expectations, allowing an employee to improve and warning that continued problems could lead to dismissal with cause.

Mentzelopoulos’s lawyer Brett Code accused the government of trying to retreat from its performance allegations while resisting disclosure. The province and its lawyers declined CBC’s request for comment on the ruling; AHS did not respond.

The civil case also intersects with an RCMP investigation. A letter filed in court last month said the investigation concerns alleged fraud, breach of trust and money laundering, and may involve material overlapping with documents in the lawsuit. Those remain allegations, not findings.

Sources