It’s the summer season at the legislature and the only things moving with any purpose are the tourists.
Ordinarily there wouldn’t be much to talk about other than Peterborough Liberal MPP Jeff Leal’s wacky attempt to introduce legislation which would enshrine the urban myth around picking the trillium, the white, three-petal wild flower which is the emblem of the province.
Contrary to popular wisdom, picking the flower is not illegal in Ontario - and a good thing too because I transplanted a bunch from Muskoka to my Toronto garden a few years ago under the cover of night thinking I was a rebel with a spade.
That aside, however, an unmistakable smell is wafting from the government position and it’s not the trillium’s cousin, the red-petal stinking Benjamin. (Yes, it’s a real flower).
The malodorous issue is that of eHealth and more precisely what’s been spent in untendered contracts and related expenses.
All this first erupted last spring with former eHealth CEO Sarah Kramer’s resignation followed shortly by board chairman Dr. Alan Hudson, after the opposition parties howled about lavish spending and $2,700 per diem payments as part of $5 million in untendered contracts awarded to consultants which has since been revised to about $15 million.
Health Minister David Caplan exacerbated the mess by stepping deeper into it even as he tried to stomp out the fires burning around his bailiwick. First, it was just isolated, then eHealth announced it would have PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP review its spending. Then Caplan called off PWC saying the auditor general would take the lead in the investigation.
The opposition knew from the first whiff they were onto something and at the end of last month the government tried to bury its scent under a tsunami of paperwork, releasing six thick binders with hundreds of pages of receipts, meeting minutes, and other documents.
That’s when it really hit the fan because on a slow summer’s day with nothing else of much importance going on and with the imminent settling of the Toronto city workers strike at hand, everyone could smell a good story fermenting despite the rotting stench of piled up garbage outside the leafy confines of Queen’s Park.
Politics is optics and when it comes to government spending, it doesn’t get much better than this. Between 2007 and 2008 eHealth Ontario spent $82 million. We know now at least $15 million was untendered and went to a company with close political ties to the Liberal Party.
That’s probably not a surprise. One of the perks of office is doling out contracts and work to the people who helped get you there and will help keep you in power. It’s the nature of the spending which is starting to look awfully ugly. With a recession killing jobs and shrinking household incomes, the McGuinty government is up to its neck in embarrassing material.
Aside from the $400 limousine rides Kramer took from Toronto to London, Ont.; aside from eHealth board member Khalil Barsoum’s $2,400 round-trip flight from Florida, associated car rentals, and road tolls so he could make it to a Toronto board meeting; and aside from paying other board members to fly to Toronto or in some cases, $380 a day to “prepare” for said meetings, the real stench here is that after spending something in the region of $650 million, the agency and its predecessor have almost nothing to show for it.
There is no plan in place. There is no privacy legislation model such as British Columbia’s eHealth (Personal Health Information Access and Protection of Privacy) Act to look at. Nada. Zilch.
What we have instead is a consultant paid $2,700 a day who then bills an extra $5 for tea and cookies.
Political scandal aside, eHealth is a serious issue with major ramifications. Ontario is the nation’s biggest, most populous, most educated, and most skilled province. It should be leading the country with a model eHealth program. Yes, it’s a complex issue but other jurisdictions have managed to get their programs up and running.
This is not merely about letting health care professionals have digital access to our health records so that we don’t have to wait for documents to be sent to our doctor’s offices or end up getting unnecessary treatment at an out-of-town hospital because we couldn’t articulate our medical histories.
This is a sweeping change in the way we manage health care, collectively one of our biggest expenses on the public purse. Digital records will not produce massive savings to the system but the opportunity to analyze the anonymous, aggregated data will provide a gold mine of information which we can then apply to better manage our precious resources.
In the hands of skilled researchers it might even start to suggest links to diseases in our population in real time. The potential is as great as the human genome project.
What we have instead is a $650 million pile of stinking nothing. Try as they might, Caplan and colleagues aren’t going to scrape this mess off their shoes too easily.
Ian Harvey has been a journalist for 32 years writing about a diverse range of issues including legal and political affairs. His e-mail address is [email protected].
