Shandro hearing Day 3: Justice minister cross-examined on inconsistencies in statements about controversial interactions with doctors, public
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Posted January 26, 2023 • 4 minute read
9 comments Tyler Shandro when he was Secretary of Health. Photo by David Bloom /Postmedia Contents of the article
Alberta Attorney General Tyler Shandro faced hours of cross-examination Thursday as a hearing to determine whether he violated the bar association’s code of conduct enters its final stages.
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Shandro presided over a Law Society of Alberta court this week on alleged misconduct on three counts related to his interactions with members of the public when he was health secretary.
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Shandro, a non-practicing attorney, is accused of inappropriately contacting Red Deer doctors Lauralee Dukeshire and John Julyan-Gudgeon on their personal cellphones after a tense exchange at a funding announcement. He is also accused of Dr. Mukarram confronted Zaidi outside his Calgary home after Zaidi posted a meme criticizing a healthcare company run by Shandro’s wife – and contacted a member of the public, Janice Fraser, in his government email after Fraser sent one had message to Shandro’s wife alleging they have a conflict of interest.
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Shandro claims he did nothing wrong and either contacted concerned advocacy groups or defended his wife from a harassment campaign surrounding the UCP government’s decision to terminate her contract with the Alberta Medical Association.
However, lawyers with the bar say that Shandro’s actions are indecent for a lawyer and should discourage the public from engaging in legitimate debate.
During the investigation by his own attorney early Thursday, Shandro presented the complaints against him as politically motivated and offered different versions of events.
Shandro said he decided to contact Zaidi and Fraser about an alleged harassment campaign that followed the Alberta government’s decision to end its 2012 framework agreement with the AMA.
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Shandro said that at the time, “conspiracy theories” arose about his holdings in Vital Partners Inc., a third-party benefits brokerage firm run by his wife Andrea, as well as Telus’ Babylon health app.
Shandro said Vital Partners has been inundated with threatening emails and voice messages related to their alleged conflict of interest. On one occasion, Vital Partners closed its office and Calgary Police took statements from the Shandros at their home following a threat (Shandro previously said a man visited the office and threatened to attack Andrea Shandro).
“Andrea was pretty upset, the kids were crying,” Tyler Shandro recalled. He said the family sometimes consider leaving the province altogether.
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On March 21, 2020, Shandro said Andrea Shandro informed him that Zaidi, a neighbor he knew from his days on the Calgary-West Progressive Conservative Party board, had posted a meme about Vital Partners. The meme was a photo of Tyler Shandro with a thought bubble: “So every Albertan I can start healthcare for is another client we can sign up for Vital Partners! We’re going to be RICH!’
Zaidi claimed that later that day, Shandro came to his house crying and yelling at him to delete the post.
However, Shandro insisted that he neither scream nor cry. His wife didn’t hold him either, as the doctor claimed.
“Andrea wasn’t there,” he said of the initial interaction, adding that denying her presence wouldn’t do him any good. “If anything, it would be helpful if she were there to confirm. So no, that’s not true.”
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Shandro said Zaidi seemed embarrassed and asked him to delete the post.
“I said, ‘You have to decide that for yourself’ … you just have to know what it does to Andrea,” Shandro testified.
In Shandro’s version, Andrea Shandro came in mid-conversation. Tyler Shandro said she was upset and her eyes may have been red from crying. He confirmed Zaidi’s claim that she loudly told her husband, “Don’t talk to him (Zaidi), he doesn’t care about us, he only cares about money.”
“We just walked away at that point, I took her home,” Shandro said.
However, during cross-examination, Shandro admitted that this version of events was inconsistent with previous statements about the incident.
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Ken McEwan, a Vancouver attorney representing the Bar Association, noted an earlier statement by Shandro’s publicist that Shandro had asked Zaidi to delete the post.
“What you’re asking the panel to believe – and I don’t accept that – but your evidence is that he (Zaidi) offered to take it down and you said, ‘It’s up to you?'”
Shandro agreed that this was his proof.
McEwan also produced a letter that Shandro sent to the Bar Association in response to the original complaint, which said the Zaidi incident “came to the attention of the news media only through the actions of the Alberta Medical Association, an organization that has an agenda has the destruction of my political career.”
Zaidi previously testified that he did not contact the CBC reporter who first reported the driveway incident, but was instead contacted independently. McEwan argued that when Shandro made the statement to the Bar Association, he was unaware of how the media got hold of the story.
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“I don’t know who spoke to (the reporter) first, no,” Shandro admitted.
Shortly after Shandro gave his testimony, Zaidi, who completed his testimony on Tuesday, released a tweet accusing Shandro of lying under oath about their interaction. The tweet teased a Thursday night interview with CTV News.
McEwan also dismissed Shandro’s claim that the Vital Partners affair was a conspiracy theory, and instead framed it as a legitimate topic of discussion. He noted that while Shandro invested his shares in a blind trust on the advice of the Legislative Ethics Commissioner, he could have quelled the controversy by divesting himself outright.
Shandro’s hearing was scheduled to last three days but was derailed twice on Thursday by lengthy on-camera sessions. The hearing panel first went into a private session about concerns, with Shandro sharing confidential information about a previous Criminal Injuries Review Board hearing during his testimony. The panel later held a private discussion on how to address Zaidi’s tweet, which was ongoing at the time of publication Thursday afternoon.
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