P3 fiasco: Windsor Star calls for resignation of Minister & review by AG

The Windsor Star has called for the resignation of the Health Minister over the Windsor long term care public-private partnership (P3) that recently fell apart. The Star has also called for a review of the project by the Auditor General.

The Grace Hospital saga continued this week as a Ministry of Health spokeswoman admitted the province was "not aware" developer Lou Vozza was facing a mountain of civil judgments in 2009, just as the Liberals were expanding the scope of his contract to build a longterm care facility.

As the number of claims against Vozza became public - almost 30 parties were registered in Superior Court on June 24, the day the contract was finally cancelled - the sense of disbelief continued to grow.

How was it possible that Health Minister Deb Matthews, who just three weeks ago expressed faith in Vozza's ability to get the job done, would be oblivious to his financial woes from the get-go?

How could she be "very pleased" with his progress on June 11 when the government's own Ministry of Revenue had registered more than $63,000 in liens against the property just six weeks before? And how could anyone at Queen's Park not be up to speed after almost four years of delays and broken promises?....

The lack of due diligence at all levels is shocking; even more so since it goes back so many years. When the province upped Vozza's contract by 90 beds in February 2009, there were already court judgments of $1 million in unpaid bills against him. He hadn't paid city taxes in five years and had millions of dollars in mortgages.

It would have been simple to check on Vozza's financial status, had someone wanted to do so....

By not gathering the pertinent data, Matthews has done harm to the frail elderly patients who are supposed to be living on the Grace site today. She's failed Ontario taxpayers and jeopardized health care services in Windsor and Essex County.

Along with Matthews' resignation, the provincial auditor must fully investigate what went wrong. That review can't wait until after the election. It must start now.

Unfortunately, missing from the Star's editorial is any recognition that this is a P3 private fiance project or that the government (and likely the PCs who support more privatization) plan to increase the use of privatized P3s.

In his first review of a P3, the Auditor General exposed major problems with the Brampton Civic Hospital P3, echoing most of the concerns raised by the Ontario Health Coalition (and OCHU) earlier.

Comments

Huge cuts in public sector wages predicted

The Ontario Financial Accountability Office (FAO) says that, with inflation, real wages in the public sector will decline 11.3% over the three year period 2021/2 - 2023/4 . This would radically deepen the trend towards lower wages during the last ten years. The FAO reports that since 2011, the average annual salary for the Ontario public sector employees (defined here as employees of schools, colleges, provincial government, provincial agencies, and hospitals) has increased by $10,385 -- or 1.6 per cent on average annually. This is the lowest increase of all the sectors and lower than inflation, which averaged 1.8 per cent per year. Over the ten years that would be about a 2% pay cut. The FAO reports that wage settlements were the lowest in the provincial public sector over the last decade: Hospital Wages Especially Challenged: The FAO predicts hospital wages will increase even less than in the public sector -- just ...

Are health care administrative expenses out of control in Ontario?

The Progressive Conservative government has justified its health restructuring plans with the claim that administrative expenses are much higher in Ontario than in Canada. When introducing the reforms, health minister Christine Elliott claimed , “Over the last five years, Ontario has spent 30% more than the Canadian average in administrative expenses on its health care system.” Elliott did not indicate her source of information. Presumably, however, the Progressive Conservatives are referring to the CIHI simplified and user friendly “ Your Health System ” graphs. Those graphs show “administrative expenses” in Ontario at 5.8% in Ontario while it is 4.5% in Canada. This CIHI measure is actually fairly narrowly defined. It is the percentage of “the legal entity’s” total expenses associated with the administrative, finance, human resources and communications functional centres. However “the legal entity” used for this estimate is [1] only...

Too many public sector workers in Ontario?

Opponents of public services often try to portray the public sector as having grown disproportionately. In fact, since 1976, the number of public sector employees has not quite kept pace with the population. In 1976, the number of public sector employees in Ontario as reported by Statistics Canada averaged 830,800. By 2012, the number had increased to 1,330,700 -- a 60.2% increase. That sounds like significant growth -- true. But the population has increased from 8,413,779 in 1976 to 13,505,900 in 2012, a 60.5% increase. In other words, population growth has run slightly ahead of the growth in public sector employment. In 1976, close to 10% of the population worked in the public sector. It stayed pretty much this way until the Mike Harris government came to power when it dipped below 9%. It returned close to the historical range in the last six years or so, declining in 2012 to below the 1976 averag...

Defend Public Healthcare

Search This Blog