The hiring and unhiring of Dr. Deena Hinshaw warrants answers that we aren't getting

We know who hired Dr. Deena Hinshaw to a new role supporting public and preventive health in Alberta.

We don't know who un-hired her.

But we're starting to learn about the consequences of that somebody's decision to rescind the appointment of Alberta's former top public health doctor to a role in Alberta Health Services serving Indigenous people.

Surely, there would have been consequences of letting Hinshaw's hire stand — mostly of the political kind, and largely within the base of Premier Danielle Smith.

The consequences of nixing her new job at AHS go beyond the political, and appear to have cascaded.

First, AHS' Indigenous Wellness Core is deprived of the new public health and preventive medicine lead it had just hired and oriented, days before she was supposed to begin her job in early June.

Subsequently, this group's senior medical director, Dr. Esther Tailfeathers, resigned out of frustration with the mysteriously vetoed hire. The tally, then, is at least two senior doctors gone from the group in AHS focused on the Albertans with some of the population's most challenging health outcomes and risks.

I say, "at least" two senior doctors are gone in wake of this, because much higher up AHS' org chart, the agency also lost the executive who oversaw the Indigenous Wellness Core a few days after Hinshaw's un-hiring, CBC News can confirm.

Dr. Braden Manns resigned as the health agency's interim vice-president of provincial clinical excellence on June 11. He detailed his reasons in a lengthy letter to Dr. John Cowell, hired by Premier Smith as AHS' administrator, or one-man board of directors.

Manns confirmed his resignation from his executive-level AHS post in an email to CBC News on Thursday. He would not state his reasons for leaving.

There are so many questions about the hiring of the prominent figure and the abrupt cancellation that began this chain of events at AHS. Most of them start with "why."

The agency in charge of most of Alberta's hospitals, and the province's largest employer, has no interest in answering any questions on this.

"We have nothing to add," an AHS spokesperson wrote in an email.

The only thing the agency's communications staff had added thus far in this unusual saga was obfuscation. In early June, after images of Hinshaw's hiring announcement emerged on social media — and set off torrents of outrage from conservatives who loathed Hinshaw's pandemic performance — AHS released a three-sentence statement, one that bears some annotation: