He is pitching a vision of economic independence for Alberta, but his own financial history is checkered

“We talked about the reality of virtually eliminating trade barriers,” said Modry, who was among a group of separatists that visited Washington, D.C. last year, including for a meeting in what another member of the delegation claimed was a secure room at the U.S. State Department.

“This doesn’t get to be much higher in the echelons of power.”

Now in his late 70s, Modry, a former surgeon, has established himself as a pioneering voice in the separatist movement. He co-founded the Alberta Prosperity Society, which promotes a “free and prosperous nation” and crafted the petition that played a critical role in putting Alberta on a path to referendum.

An elder statesman of Alberta’s resurgent independence movement, Modry delivers speeches that have inspired younger leaders and positioned himself as a steady hand on Alberta’s quest for economic independence. But all the while, a long trail of court documents reveals a history of his own financial problems.

Troubled finances revealed in civil courts

Last year, a judge found he misappropriated nearly $1.3 million from two vulnerable and elderly relatives.

Modry told the court he invested the funds, according to his relatives’ wishes, in crypto and his ambitious luxury condo project. That money appears to be gone — the condo development collapsed and the crypto allegedly stolen by cyber criminals. Now a court is trying to recoup money Modry owes with garnishment orders on his accounts, as well on the Alberta Prosperity Society.

At one point during his mounting financial troubles, Modry abruptly stopped working, triggering a chain of events that left him owing more than $1 million to the provincial health department.

As Modry and the other movement leaders push for a sovereign Alberta, the economic viability of which is a matter of national debate and scrutiny, their personal financial track records have come into focus.

Another activist in the vanguard of the separatist cause made headlines this summer after allegations he drained millions of dollars held by two First Nations’ settlement trusts.

Who is the ‘real’ Dennis Modry?

Modry told the Star he has “never misappropriated a cent in my life.” He said questions about his financial struggles are an attempt to hobble the sovereignty movement he has spent years helping to build, that his past court cases are irrelevant, and a Star story focusing on them amounts to a hit piece. His confidence in the economic future of a sovereign Alberta is based on his analysis of the data and research by economists, accountants and other experts.

“The people who know me, know of my integrity, and I’ll leave it at that,” he said. “Albertans have already made up their minds how they will vote regardless of your character assassination.”

On Monday, Albertans will be asked to vote on whether to move forward with a binding vote on separation from Canada, a vision for their province that rests, in part, on the arguments made by the movement’s leadership. The leaders’ credentials could weigh into that decision.

“The financial questions that have emerged are deeply troubling,” said Lori Williams, a political scientist at Calgary’s Mount Royal University.

Modry’s checkered financial past raises questions about his integrity and judgment, Williams added. “If we’re talking about the kind of leadership that might lead an independent Alberta, seeing this kind of unethical conduct … could understandably lead voters to wonder what kind of leadership an independent Alberta would have to offer.”

The court records reviewed by the Star show there have long been questions about Modry’s finances.

In 2005, a judge presiding over the settling of Modry’s divorce from his wife of 30 years, had to work for answers when determining the former surgeon’s level of spousal support:

“Somewhere between the bankrupt Dennis Modry, and the $7.3 million net worth Dennis Modry is the real Dennis Modry.”

A celebrated surgeon’s political awakening

While Modry went to Stanford University in the early 1980s to learn how to transplant hearts and lungs, then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau had just introduced the National Energy Program, to boost Canadian ownership of the oil industry.

The controversial initiative was eventually cancelled and largely forgotten, but not in Alberta, where it radicalized a generation of Albertans who felt Ottawa was crippling the industrial engine of the province.

When he returned to Canada, Modry started voicing his discontent with government policy and what he saw as bloat in the health care system. And he had a platform.

He had achieved a near celebrity status in Edmonton, where in 1985 he performed the first heart transplant in western Canada.

The society pages followed him about town, to a Guys-and-Dolls-themed party that raised money for the local theatre and a charity event in 1998 where he wore a suit made by the same designer who fashioned Wayne Gretzky’s wedding tux.

In 1994, according to the Financial Post, he made a submission to the Tax Reform Commission of Alberta, arguing that the province could be a tax haven if only it would cut corporate taxes entirely: “We are over-governed, over-regulated and overtaxed.”

A succession of Progressive Conservative governments in the 1990s asked him to participate in finance committees, he told the Star.

“It was satisfying to also have input to government when they posed questions to me, and I would give them my response,” he said, “and what they did with it was up to them. … The point is that I have an analytical mind.”

At the height of his career, Modry made more than $1 million a year performing high-risk surgeries for patients that often travelled long distances to his operating room.

But in 1999, when he separated from his first wife, his financial footing seemed uncertain.

Modry was ordered to pay his ex-wife Patricia Dale Modry $7,500 per month for the first five years. She then applied to increase and extend it. Modry countered that she should be capable of earning at least $20,000 per year and could sell the valuable lake cottage she’d gotten in the divorce.

The judge, who ultimately extended and increased the support Modry was required to pay, described the doctor’s financial position as having “the ability to transmute itself depending on the circumstances.”

According to the judgment, Modry certified for his bank that his net worth was $7.5 million. But an accountant hired by his ex-wife during the divorce proceedings put it at $3.6 million. His own accountant declared him bankrupt. Modry told the star he was never bankrupt.

‘I was defrauded of several million’

In late summer of 2013, Modry cancelled two surgeries and abruptly left town. Modry said his departure concerned a business matter, telling the Star, “I was defrauded of several million … I wasn’t in a frame of mind to proceed.”

When he returned, Modry was informed by the health authority that he was under assessment.

Officials with Alberta Health Services asked him to voluntarily withdraw from his surgical practice and, if he did so, offered to pay him $20,000 per week until a final decision was made. Modry accepted the deal.

The conduct review turned up other issues, and a report completed in the fall of 2013 outlined concerns about Modry scheduling elective surgeries while on call, “unprofessional and inappropriate” behaviour with respect to a specific patient and unspecified “personal issues.” The report also raised concerns about the mortality rates of his surgeries.

Modry told the Star that he would see fragile patients that other surgeons would not. He said these patients required longer recoveries in hospital, driving up costs. He alleged that much of AHS’s frustrations with him were economic.

“Let me put it this way: not all hockey players are equal. Not all football players are equal. Not all lawyers are equal,” he said. “But the public seems to think that all physicians or all surgeons are equal. That isn’t the case either,” he said. “If you have a comfort level of doing high-risk cases, which I did, and others objected to that, particularly at the administrative level, then, how do you deal with that?”

The review was put on hold when Modry underwent another review that all surgeons undergo when they turn 65. This other assessment flagged concerns about his “performance, team work, and history on files.”

The health authority proposed a return-to-work plan that would have, among other things, limited the amount and types of surgeries he could do. 

Modry said the plan was “entirely unfair” and that keeping him out of the operating room was detrimental for his reputation and skills as a surgeon. He won an injunction to stop the agency’s plan.

But an appeals court sided with AHS, which told the court that Modry’s surgical outcomes and judgment were a matter of public interest.

The court decided that any potential harm to AHS and the public, “specifically in respect of the current breakdown in trust and confidence” outweighed any damage that might be done to Modry.

The 2015 decision meant Modry had to repay AHS $1.64 million. Modry sought leave to appeal at the Supreme Court of Canada but told the Star the case never made it there because he reached a settlement with the AHS that netted him a “lot of money.” The AHS refused to comment on Modry’s characterizations of a settlement. Modry then retired from medicine.

The glittering penthouse project

After putting the scalpel down, Modry wasted little time reinventing himself. A year after the appeals court decision, he threw himself into Privada Project, a $144-million real estate development in which he planned to knock down his own $6.6-million house overlooking the North Saskatchewan River and build 45 luxury condos.

The four-storey units would feature private elevators, virtual golf ranges and stone imported from Italian quarries, according to news reports. Seventeen had reportedly been pre-sold and construction was expected to begin the following spring.

“I’m a property developer now,” he told a reporter at the time.

The penthouses were expected to sell for between $2.5 and $5 million. At the time, the average detached home in Edmonton sold for just shy of $400,000.

The design phase cost “millions,” according to Modry, and he’d personally borrowed $7 million to put toward the project.

By the time he was promoting the glittering project, he had also been helping his vulnerable aunt and uncle who lived on Vancouver Island.

But his handling of their finances would land him in court again, and a judge would find a disturbing connection between his relatives’ money and the Privada project.

In the fall of 2014, Modry had been given power of attorney by his uncle Fred Bodnar and his wife, Laurette Bodnar. That gave him control over their bank accounts.

The Bodnars had cascading health problems. Laurette had been hospitalized for a broken hip. Fred was admitted, too, because he depended on his wife for daily care. By the time he was discharged three months later, he was diagnosed with “moderate cognitive impairment.”

In January of 2015, Fred Bodnar allegedly assaulted a home support worker with a kitchen knife. When the worker sued, Modry claimed that Fred was “suffering from dementia,” according to court records, and that “he was incapable of appreciating the nature and quality of his acts.”

Were the ‘Penthouses in the Park’ a mirage?

Four months after the assault, Modry and Fred travelled to Edmonton and, according to court documents, Modry said that he showed Fred the details of the Privada project and his uncle expressed a desire to invest and even design a unit for himself.

Modry told the court that, with Fred’s permission, he sank a significant portion of his aunt and uncle’s money into the condo project. He told the Star that his uncle, who had the highest quality care possible, was enthusiastic about helping to finance the project.

But the project was faltering. The plans had ruffled the feathers of well-heeled neighbours concerned about increased traffic in the neighbourhood and possible slope instability that could send buildings toppling down the river bank.

In 2019, Servus Credit Union sued Modry, claiming he had gone past his $2.2-million overdraft limit and wasn’t paying it back.

Listed as collateral for the loan were three parcels of land where he’d planned to build his condo development.

The bank wanted the debt repaid, or the land.

Privada never broke ground.

Modry told the Star that the project was “ultimately derailed” by a “wealthy Edmonton individual” who interfered with project financing and took control of the property. “I lost $24 million.”

Modry tells court he lost his home and savings

In 2021, the Bodnars’ niece Verna Holmes sued Modry, saying he enriched himself at the expense of his uncle and his wife, both of whom had cognitive difficulties.

In his statement of defence, Modry claimed something different than what he had told another court five years earlier about his uncle. Modry now argued that “aside from occasional forgetfulness,” Fred Bodnar “continued to be of sound mind and mental capacity until the time of his death” but that the care required for the two seniors was significant. He said that Fred had okayed the investment of his and Laurette’s funds in the Privada project.

Modry also sold their house and a car, and wrote cheques to himself from the Bodnars’ accounts totalling more than $1 million.

While many withdrawals were made to pay for the Bodnars’ groceries and medical expenses, according to court records, others included more than $9,000 for bitcoin, a payment to a Napa Valley winery for 24 bottles of wine, and to cover six months’ rent for a condo in Scottsdale, Arizona. (The judge noted that Modry said that he needed to establish residence in the U.S. to gain access to funds his aunt and uncle had in America.)

Last year, the judge found Modry breached his fiduciary duties.

In an affidavit quoted in the judgment, Modry had explained that “I lost my home, my project, my equity and my financial retirement nest egg, along with the funds that I had invested in the project on Fred and Laurette’s behalf.”

The judge ordered Modry to pay it back.

Modry told the Star that relatives were “exceptionally well looked after,” and he’d done “exactly” what his uncle had asked him to do. The judge noted that while Modry said he invested the bulk of the nearly-$1.3 million in Privada, he failed to disclose supporting records and “deprived both the applicant and the court of any means of confirming this claim.”

Holmes, the relative who filed the suit against Modry, told the Star that the family was saddened for Fred and Laurette and that the evidence in the judgment spoke for itself. “He spent all of their hard-earned savings on his own personal financial interests,” Holmes said, “and even failed in that endeavour, apparently.”

Modry said he is unaware of the garnishment attempts, that the repayment is “between my lawyer and the other lawyers.” The Alberta Prosperity society declined to comment, and Modry’s lawyer in the Bodnar case, Jamil Sawani, said no court actions in relation to his client have any connection to the organization.

Modry added that, “You don’t need to look at a civil matter that I was dealing with in order to parse validity in terms of any statements that I make on behalf of the benefits to Albertans with respect to becoming a sovereign country … It’s completely irrelevant.”

He declined to say whether there have been more conversations with the Trump administration, or what his role is now with the organization he founded. But as the Alberta referendum approaches, he added, the work continues.

“I’m just focused on working behind the scenes,” he said. “Put it that way.”

He said Verna Holmes has been “paid out.” Holmes said that is not true and she is still waiting for Modry to pay the money back.