Alberta working on agreement to send Turkish pain medication to Ukraine: Smith

The Alberta government is working on a deal to send some of its stash of controversial children's pain medication to Ukraine.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says her government is working on a deal to send scores of its controversial stash of unused children’s pain medication to Ukraine.

Smith says a group approached the government with the idea and the province is now looking for Health Canada approval.

“Well, Ukraine is in the middle of a war, as you probably know,” Smith told reporters Friday. “A group approached us to help provide this medication to war-torn areas of the world, and we said we’d work with them.”

Alberta has been sitting on 1.4 million bottles of the medication after officials determined in 2023 that it posed serious health risks when given to infants.

The Opposition NDP is critical of the plan to send the medication to Ukraine, saying it would put already vulnerable children further at risk.

“Danielle Smith is trying to change the channel,” NDP health critic Sarah Hoffman told CTV News. “She’s trying to get these drugs out of the warehouse that they’re spending money to store it in, and brush off some of the scandal.“

“In the middle of a war zone, we’re going to say, ‘here, take our garbage medication that we say isn’t good enough for Alberta kids.’”

The government paid $70 million to MHCare Medical for the medication in 2022 during a countrywide shortage.

Alberta only received about 30 per cent of the shipment and the company that provided it is now embroiled in a provincial contracting scandal.

News of its movement comes just weeks after a lawsuit filed by the fired head of AHS alleges favouritism in contracting and names MHCare and its founder, Sam Mraiche.

“This is both about incompetence and corruption,” Hoffman said.

“It’s possible that the timing of this is related to the heat that the government has been taking for some of its contracting,” legal and health expert Lorian Hardcastle added.

“Things have gotten progressively worse for this government over the last month as the various layers of the onion have been peeled back on this scandal and we’ve found out more and more.”

“Hopefully what comes out of this is not only there is fact-finding around what happened with respect to the (AHS scandal), but that more generally, recommendations come out to make sure contracting in the health space is more transparent.”

With files from The Canadian Press