EHealth scandal a $1B waste: auditor

Criminals run the province of Ontario, the HST will cover the cost of this scandal!



Wednesday, October 7, 2009 | 8:10 PM ET

A scathing report on the eHealth Ontario spending scandal charges that successive governments wasted $1 billion in taxpayer money.

Ontario Auditor General Jim McCarter released his investigation into the eHealth agency on Wednesday morning.

His report says the board of directors at eHealth Ontario felt it had little power over CEO Sarah Kramer because she had been hired by chair Alan Hudson "with the support of the premier." That, McCarter said, gave Kramer the impression she had approval to ignore normal procurement procedures.

It was revealed late Tuesday that Health Minister David Caplan resigned because of the report.

Just minutes after the release of the report, Premier Dalton McGuinty announced that Children and Youth Services Minister Deb Matthews would take over the health portfolio.

Toronto MPP Laurel Broten, a former environment minister, will be brought back into cabinet to take over from Matthews.

"Ontario taxpayers have not received value for money for this $1 billion investment," McCarter said in the report.

The idea behind eHealth is to create electronic health records for Ontario, something the auditor says could save $6 billion if implemented in every province and territory.

Instead, Ontario "is near the back of the pack" when it comes to electronic health records, having wasted millions on underused computer systems and untendered contracts.

The report is damning in its criticism of the way governments have allowed eHealth and its predecessor, Smart Systems for Health, to let spending go out of control with few safeguards to protect tax dollars.

McCarter says the province was "lacking in strategic direction and relying too heavily on external consultations."

At one point, the auditor writes, the eHealth program branch had "fewer than 30 full-time employees but was engaging more than 300 consultants."

McCarter said charges that favouritism was shown toward certain companies "without giving other firms a chance to compete were largely true."

"When you have a lack of oversight, that's a lack of appropriate management," he said at a Wednesday morning news conference.

"When you get a lack of oversight, you get broken rules. It goes together like a horse and carriage."

At the heart of the report are four recommendations aimed at putting an end to scandals like the one that enveloped the eHealth agency:

•Develop a strategic plan for implementation of electronic health records.
•Improve oversight by board of directors.
•Rely less on outside consultants.
•Ensure procurement policies are followed.
Agency doled out millions: report
In May, documents obtained by CBC News showed the eHealth agency doled out millions of dollars in contracts without any apparent attempt to open the deals to outside bidders within the first four months of its creation in September 2008.

Kramer billed thousands of dollars for limousine rides, including one $400 trip from Toronto to London, Ont., before she resigned from her $380,000-a-year job in June. She was given a $317,000 severance package and received a $114,000 bonus after just 10 months on the job.

Hudson also stepped down.

The departures came after the Conservatives and New Democrats complained the agency gave out $5 million in untendered contracts to consultants.

Documents released by the government since then showed the value of those untendered contracts was closer to $16 million, with the biggest ones going to companies the opposition parties say have ties to the Liberal government.

Too much power in too few hands
McCarter's probe, which went back to 2000, criticized unnamed consulting companies for driving up each other's fees to artificially create a higher rate for their services and putting too much power in too few hands in awarding of contracts.

In his report, the auditor general also slammed unnamed officials at the Ministry of Health for thwarting his efforts to get investigators into the ministry for a routine audit in the summer of 2008. In the end, the audit didn't happen until February 2009.

McGuinty has since announced new rules to keep a closer eye on the expenses of about 300 top executives at 22 of Ontario's 615 arm's-length agencies, boards and commissions by having them approved by the province's integrity commissioner.

EHealth was set up in 2008 to create electronic health records after Smart Systems for Health spent $650 million but failed to produce anything of lasting value.

Smart Systems for Health was quietly shut down last September.

EHealth expenses
Some of the consulting costs incurred at eHealth:

•$2,700-a-day consultant, charging $3.26 for a muffin and tea.
•$300-an-hour consultant, charging for reading an article on electronic health records given to her by her husband, another consultant.
•Two consultants serving as vice-presidents and flown regularly from homes in Alberta.
•$1,700-a-day executive assistant.
•Consultants charging to watch an eHealth episode on TVO's The Agenda and "debriefing" on the Toronto subway.
Consultants were contracted by eHealth at up to $2,750 a day. They then billed taxpayers for out-of-pocket expenses that included $1.65 for a cup of tea and $3.99 for cookies.

CBC.CA

Deputy fire chief avoids street-racing fine

COBOURG–A top Toronto fire official charged under street-racing laws has pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of speeding.

Deputy Fire chief Daryl Fuglerud admitted through his lawyer in provincial court in Cobourg on Wednesday that he drove 50 km/h over the speed limit on Hwy. 401 near Port Hope in June. He was fined $343.

Fuglerud, 53, was on his way to the funeral of a retired firefighter in the Kingston area when police clocked him driving a department SUV at 150 km/h. He was charged under the street-racing and stunt-driving legislation passed in May 2008.

Outside court his lawyer Robbie Levita said the "career man and family man" was not racing, stunting or driving at a "horrendous" speed. Levita couldn't explain why Fuglerud, who's been with the city's fire department for 28 years, was going so fast.

"He's extremely remorseful, that's why he pled guilty," Levita said, adding that Fuglerud ended up missing the funeral because the vehicle, which belongs to Toronto Fire Services, was impounded for seven days, and his licence was suspended for a week.

In an agreed statement of facts in the Ontario Court of Justice, police clocked the red Toyota Highlander from the air doing 143, 147 and 150 km/h in a 100 km/h zone.

If he had been convicted of racing, he would have faced a fine between $2,000 and $10,000.

OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino championed the street-racing law as a way to decrease the "senseless carnage" on Ontario highways, vowing it will do so "one irresponsible driver at a time."

Toronto Star

Big salaries filtered through hospitals

October 06, 2009
Rob Ferguson and Tanya Talaga
Toronto Star
(Oct 6, 2009)
Hefty salaries for some of Ontario's highest paid civil servants are being channelled through hospitals to skirt government pay guidelines, the Toronto Star has learned.

Deputy health minister Ron Sapsford, for example, earned nearly $500,000 last year in salary and taxable benefits through Hamilton Health Sciences Centre.

As Premier Dalton McGuinty's administration clamps down on untendered contracts and consultants' meal expenses in the wake of the eHealth Ontario spending scandal, salaries for top bureaucrats are being buried in hospital budgets.

The premier's hand-picked climate-change adviser, Hugh MacLeod, was paid $320,695 last year by University Health Network, according to the government's public sector salary disclosure documents.

Sapsford earns a salary of $433,611 plus $64,700 in taxable benefits through the Hamilton Health Sciences Centre.

Gail Paech, an associate deputy minister of economic development and trade and a former senior health bureaucrat, was paid $291,997.20 by the University Health Network last year.

The salaries are well above the maximum $220,150 recommended for deputy ministers and the range of $146,700 to $188,950 for associate and assistant deputies.

By comparison, Premier Dalton McGuinty earns $207,427 and Health Minister David Caplan made $164,623 last year.

The practice is used as a means to attract top talent to the bureaucracy, said Kevin Finnerty, a spokesperson for the Health Ministry.

"We need to pay them comparable salaries," he said. "This is a long-standing practice back to 1994."

Sapsford, who was paid nearly $500,000 in salary and benefits by HHS last year, is a former chief operating officer of the group of six Hamilton hospitals and a cancer treatment centre. But that posting was some time ago, said HHS spokesperson Jeff Vallentin.

"It was five years ago, maybe," Vallentin said, declining to answer any questions about the deal and referring queries to health ministry officials in Toronto, where Sapsford, who declined to comment, is the boss.

Finnerty insisted it is not a conflict of interest for Sapsford to be in charge of a health ministry that makes decisions affecting the hospital that pays his wage.

"Every civil servant whether on secondment or not, has an oath of allegiance to the Crown and is bound by that," he said.

Another former government official said pay arrangements like Sapsford's and others are put through hospitals because they have "enhanced pensions" for senior executives.

Sapsford's pay packet is higher than that of his boss, cabinet secretary Shelly Jamieson, who earned $327,953 in salary and $10,079 in taxable benefits.

She is the province's most powerful public servant, in charge of 65,000 employees.

Climate-change adviser MacLeod is listed in salary documents as a deputy director of special projects at UHN. Asked Monday if he ever worked at the hospital network, which includes Toronto General, MacLeod replied, "No."

He was previously an associate deputy minister in the health ministry and has reported directly to the premier as associate deputy minister responsible for the climate-change secretariat since March 2008.

MacLeod confirmed in a telephone interview that his paycheque comes from the hospital network.

"It was part of the contract I entered into when I came here from B.C ... in 2003," he said, adding he is unaware of the reason for the arrangement.

"I don't know."

At UHN, vice-president of public affairs and communications Gillian Howard confirmed MacLeod and Paech are both being paid through the hospital.

"We're asked to put them on our payroll so we do," she said.

"The answer to why you're going to have to talk to the (health) ministry."

UHN and other hospitals are fully compensated by the health ministry for the salaries paid through them to non-staffers like MacLeod, ministry spokesman Finnerty said.

Finnerty said the reason for shifting the money around is simple.

"At Ontario public service salary scales we could not attract these people to work in the Ontario government," he said.

"We would not have the benefit of the expertise of these people if we did not do this."

The practice is transparent, Finnerty said, because all Ontario civil service and Crown agency employees who make more than $100,000 have their salaries disclosed online each year.


The Spec

Former eHealth execs in new contract controversy!

Some of the same executives involved in the eHealth scandal helped approve a lucrative consulting contract for a friend's firm four years ago when they were running another provincial health agency, sources tell CBC News.

The McGuinty government had tasked Cancer Care Ontario in 2005 with finding ways to reduce hospital wait times for cancer surgery. At the time, Sarah Kramer was a vice-president and the chief information officer at the agency, and Alan Hudson was the CEO.

Kramer later went on the head eHealth Ontario, while Hudson became the chair of eHealth. Kramer was fired from that job in June, and Hudson resigned as chair soon after it emerged they doled out millions of dollars in untendered contracts.

Cancer Care Ontario put out a call for tenders on June 30, 2005, to develop a computer system to measure wait times for such procedures as cardiac surgery, hip replacements and MRIs.

The agency considered 11 proposals to land the contract and narrowed the list to two contenders.

Phone call changed things
But the company that eventually landed the contract, Accenture, did not make that final short list, CBC News has learned.

The company, which was among the 11 original bidders, was contacted by Cancer Care Ontario and told it had not made the final two, Accenture told CBC News.

That changed after a senior partner at the firm, Will Falk, made a phone call to Kramer, who was on holiday when the short list was drawn up, three sources close to the bidding process told CBC News. Accenture won the contract a day or two after that phone call in mid August 2005, the sources said.

They requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

Accenture denied any wrongdoing.

"We have no reason to believe our team acted inappropriately in the contract bidding process," Accenture said in a statement. "We have both won and lost competitive work for CCO."

The statement did not deny that Falk made a call to Kramer.

Kramer, who similarly said she wasn't involved in any wrongdoing, also did not deny that she received a call from Falk.

"No single person at CCO was responsible for awarding this contract to Accenture, rather a full committee with appropriate representation and expertise decided that Accenture was the most appropriate candidate to do this work," Kramer said in a statement to CBC News.

Kramer and Falk were close personal friends — Falk was one of Kramer's references when she applied for the position of eHealth CEO.

The Cancer Care Ontario contract was initially supposed to be worth $5 million, but the sources said that amount later ballooned to close to $20 million.

The next year, Accenture secured another contract — this one was tendered — to implement the program it had designed in 50 Ontario hospitals.

No response from Falk, Hudson, Kramer
Cancer Care Ontario denied CBC's request for a copy of Accenture's wait times contract. Although it's a government agency, Cancer Care Ontario is not subject to the province's freedom of information rules.

The agency acknowledged in a statement to CBC News that Accenture did not make the final two companies. But after reviewing oral presentations from the two, "questions were raised about the financial stability of one of the vendors and the project management approach of both organizations," said Mitchell Toker, spokesman for Cancer Care Ontario.

"In addition, there was a concern that one of the vendors lacked technical expertise with the software in question."

Accenture, which was the next vendor in waiting, was asked to make an oral presentation and then secured the contract, he said.

Falk and Hudson declined requests for interviews.

eHealth was set up last September by the Liberal government. It was tasked with developing a digital record system by 2015 to allow health-care providers to electronically share patient information to prevent medical errors and reduce costs.

Kramer and Hudson left eHealth in June soon after the health agency doled out $16 million in contracts without any apparent attempt to open the deals to outside bidders within the first four months of its creation in September 2008.

The agency paid consultants millions of dollars for — among other things — watching TV, reading the New York Times and holding a conversation on the subway.

Ontario's auditor-general is due to release the results of his investigation into eHealth on Wednesday.


CBC.CA

Crown attorneys told to stop illegal juror checks

If it's illegal, why no charges?


Ontario's privacy commissioner has ordered the province's Crown attorneys to halt the collection of personal information about potential jurors beyond what is legally necessary.

In a report released Monday afternoon, Ann Cavoukian also asked the province's attorney general to create a single, centralized juror-screening process to minimize unnecessary background checks.

The 213-page report is the product of a four-month investigation into whether the privacy rights of prospective jurors were breached by police officers who conducted background checks on them on behalf of Crown attorneys.

The investigation found that 18 of the 55 Crown attorney offices in Ontario received background information about potential jurors that failed to comply with applicable privacy legislation.

It also found that practices regarding the disclosure of that information to defence counsel varied from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

The results don't point to "a sweeping epidemic," Cavoukian said.

"However, while these practices varied in terms of their invasiveness, the fact remains that 18 Crown attorney offices across the province gathered personal information that exceeded the criminal conviction eligibility criteria set out in the Juries Act and Criminal Code," she said, referring to a law that bars individuals who have been convicted and not yet pardoned of an indictable offence from serving on a jury.

Implementing a new juror screening process would amount to "a fundamental shift in the way that prospective jurors are screened in Ontario," Cavoukian said.

The process would be run by the London-based Provincial Jury Centre, which already receives the names and personal information of all prospective jurors.

The PJC is "in an ideal position to implement strict privacy and security measures that can be strongly enforced," the report said.

Investigation launched after media report
Cavoukian launched her investigation on June 10, less than three weeks after a report in the National Post described jury vetting practices in Barrie. Reports of similar vetting in Windsor and Thunder Bay soon followed.

Commissioner employees were sent to conduct in-person interviews with Crown attorneys, court staff, police officials and defence counsel in four Ontario locations, including Windsor and Barrie. They also sent empirical surveys to all 55 Crown attorney offices and sought legal submissions from a variety of legal bodies including the Ministry of the Attorney General and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

The most frequent use of invasive background checks occurred in Barrie/Simcoe County, the report concluded, where jury vetting took place in at least 53 jury trials. In Sarnia/Lambton County and St. Thomas/Elgin County, it happened in 12 cases.

In one case, in Windsor/Essex County, jury vetting led one judge to declare a mistrial in a first-degree murder case.

In June, police in Windsor acknowledged reviewing ticket histories, pardons, family issues and young offender records of potential jurors in the hopes of determining which jurors might be most amenable to the prosecution.

At the time, the police didn't "have a policy on that type of thing," said Chief Gary Smith. "It has gone on," he said. "I don't know the frequency and I don't when it started."

Problems flagged in 1993
Cavoukian's report says the issue of jury background checks was first formally flagged to the attorney general's office in March 1993, after a judge questioned disseminating a juror's personal information. Despite a memorandum sent to a branch of the attorney's general office recommending that background checks should stop, they didn't, Cavoukian points out, leaving in place "this invasive practice."

"Since then, a series of opportunities to provide guidance to Crown attorneys was missed," Cavoukian said. "In the absence of clear direction, a patchwork of practices developed across the province."

Cavoukian hopes her order and recommendations create accountability in a process that "sits at the very heart of our judicial system."

"Jury duty is one of the core legal and moral obligations that we assume as citizens," she said.

"It follows that any practice that taints, or is perceived to taint, the jury process, strikes at the very heart of the values we share as citizens of a free and democratic society."


CBC.CA

Too much coffee?

Injustices likely to surface.

Leading experts plan to meet in spring to review most contentious convictions in shaken baby cases

Oct 02, 2009 04:30 AM
Theresa Boyle
Health Reporter


One year after a groundbreaking report exposed flaws in Ontario's forensic pathology system, investigations into dozens of cases continue, with a lawyer for victims of the notorious Dr. Charles Smith expecting more miscarriages of justice to be exposed.

"I've always guessed there will be several cases coming through the shaken-baby committee as likely miscarriages of justice," James Lockyer said Thursday.

He was referring to a committee struck by the province last December to investigate 142 child deaths dating back to 1986 to determine if wrongful convictions resulted from what is now viewed as questionable science.

A review into the shaken-baby deaths was one of the recommendations contained in a report by Justice Stephen Goudge, who headed a public inquiry into Ontario's troubled forensic pathology system. The inquiry was prompted by mistakes made by pathologist Dr. Charles Smith in 20 child-death investigations, 12 of which resulted in convictions.

Attorney General Chris Bentley said in an interview Thursday that cases that don't involve issues of criminality or where the convicted person is deceased are being dropped from the probe.

The most contentious cases will then be reviewed by an international panel of leading medical experts, who are scheduled to meet in Toronto next spring.

"There's no suggestion that anyone did anything wrong. It's just that the knowledge of this shaken-baby syndrome has evolved over the years," Bentley said.

New research shows that some babies once thought to have died from being violently shaken in fact suffered injuries as a result of falls.

Another committee struck by Bentley on the advice of Goudge is looking at 22 of Smith's older cases that were not part of the public inquiry. These are child-death investigations Smith worked on between 1981 and 1991 and they are now being reviewed with a view to determining whether there were any miscarriages of justice.

Bentley said that in cases where injustice is being claimed, the Crown will respond expeditiously to any legal steps taken by the defence.

A third committee is advising Bentley on the viability of a potential compensation framework for Smith's victims. It's headed by Justice Coulter Osborne, with whom Bentley met on Wednesday.

"I know it's a challenging issue. I'm hopeful," Bentley said.

Already, two people convicted of homicide-related crimes on the basis of shaken-baby syndrome have come to the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted for assistance, noted Lockyer, a director with the organization. Both are parents who did time in jail for the unrelated deaths of their children, one in the '80s and the other in the '90s.

"In cases where this pseudo-science was used to convict people of crimes of shaking which we can now say weren't (shaking), of course they should be reviewed as likely miscarriages of justice," Lockyer said.

Lawyer and child advocate Suzan Fraser said she hopes the province will also do something for siblings of dead children who were put up for adoption or into foster care after parents were wrongly implicated in child deaths.


Toronto Star