{"id":546976,"date":"2026-03-19T15:12:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T15:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/546976\/"},"modified":"2026-03-19T15:12:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T15:12:08","slug":"although-listed-doctor-paid-through-mcp-did-not-attend-non-health-care-related-meetings-premier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/546976\/","title":{"rendered":"Although Listed, Doctor Paid Through MCP Did Not Attend Non-Health Care Related Meetings: Premier"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t&#13;<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/premier-tony-wakeham-march-18-2026.jpg\" class=\"header-image\" alt=\"Although Listed, Doctor Paid Through MCP Did Not Attend Non-Health Care Related Meetings: Premier\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Premier Tony Wakeham (VOCM News)<\/p>\n<p>The Premier says that Dr. Des Whalen did not attend several meetings listed in documents accessed by the Liberals through Access to Information.<\/p>\n<p>According to those documents, Whalen\u2019s calendar included a number of meetings between December and February \u2013 including one involving discussion on a bird dog firefighting aircraft, another on fisheries, and one involving discussions with Cenovus Energy.<\/p>\n<p>The Opposition questioned by Dr. Whalen, hired to advise the Premier\u2019s Office on health care matters and paid through MCP, was in on meetings that were clearly not about health care.   <\/p>\n<p>Premier Tony Wakeham told reporters yesterday that even though Whalen\u2019s name was included in some of those meetings, he didn\u2019t attend. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think what we should have done and perhaps could do differently is make sure that we don\u2019t include the names of everyone on the lists of meetings that are being held that they probably aren\u2019t attending. So when somebody ATIPPs a request that shows somebody potentially got an invite to attend the meeting that that didn\u2019t actually happen.,\u201d <\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey\u2019ve talked about other meetings and they\u2019ve talked about other things in the House. For example, I think it was brought up before about a meeting that he was having with an ambassador. It didn\u2019t happen.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"&#13; Premier Tony Wakeham (VOCM News) The Premier says that Dr. Des Whalen did not attend several meetings&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546977,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392],"class_list":["post-546976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546976\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}