TORONTO - A "summer of scandal" has shaken people's confidence and it's time Ontario's Liberal government was held accountable for expense abuses and untendered contracts given to consultants, the opposition parties charged Monday on the first day of the fall session.
The Progressive Conservatives and NDP also accused Premier Dalton McGuinty and Health Minister David Caplan of misleading the house last June by saying an outside auditing firm would look into problems at eHealth Ontario when the company had never been hired.
"I'd like to ask the premier a question about his summer of scandal," new Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak said as he kicked off the fall legislative sitting, his first as official Opposition Leader.
"Premier, this has to do with your work, your honesty, what you told members of this legislative assembly and what the facts were," said Hudak.
"For weeks we saw you and your health minister dodge, duck and dismiss opposition questions about the eHealth scandal, and you yourself said you retained PricewaterhouseCoopers to investigate."
The New Democrats too went on the attack over expenses and untendered contracts at provincial agencies, and complained the Liberals used their majority to block a legislative committee from investigating eHealth.
"Ontarians want to know all of the facts, but instead they see Liberal members shut down committee investigations and ministers saying third-party auditors are looking at the eHealth scandal even though they haven't been hired," said NDP Leader Andrea Horwath.
"Why is it that everyone is held accountable for this mess but the premier and his cabinet?"
There was no intention to mislead the legislature about an outside review of eHealth by PricewaterhouseCoopers, said McGuinty, who insisted it was an honest mistake on his part.
"It was certainly my understanding that PWC had been retained," he said. "There is no nefarious plot afoot as my friend might intimate."
Caplan said later that the government had directed eHealth's board of directors last May to engage PricewaterhouseCoopers, and the agency did meet with the auditing firm to discuss terms of reference for the work but never formally hired them.
The government decided to scrap the third-party review of eHealth in July after provincial Auditor General Jim McCarter pointed out his examination of the troubled agency would duplicate much of the work that PricewaterhouseCoopers was being asked to do, said Caplan.
McGuinty was on the defensive Monday even before the first question period of the session, moving to blunt opposition attacks by announcing clearer expense rules for agencies, boards and commissions.
After months of reports about unacceptable expense claims at eHealth, Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. and other agencies, the government boiled 25 pages of rules down to two, announced McGuinty.
"The steps our government is taking today will make it easier for everyone to know the rules and harder for anyone to break the rules." he said.
"Just to be clear, we're not changing the rules. We're just removing as any potential excuse that 'we didn't understand the rules."'
There will also be mandatory, computer-based training on expense rules for all 80,000 direct provincial employees and workers at the 22 largest agencies.
The opposition welcomed the clarified rules, but again demanded Caplan's resignation because of $16 million in untendered contracts awarded by eHealth and expense claims by consultants earning $2,700 a day who billed taxpayers extra for snacks and drinks.
The government must release information about all untendered contracts awarded by provincial agencies, boards and commissions, said Horwath.
"The government needs to blow open the records in terms of the last two years at least with untendered contracts," she said.
"The premier likes to talk about transparency, (well) we need to see the transparency."
The Tories and New Democrats have also been pushing for a cabinet minister to walk the plank over a similar problem with expense abuses at Ontario Lottery and Gaming, which saw the government fire the corporation's CEO, Kelly McDougald, in August.
The firing raised eyebrows because it came after the government paid Sara Kramer, the heavily criticized CEO of eHealth Ontario, $315,000 to leave her post in the midst of the scandal that rocked her agency.
McDougald announced Friday that she was launching a wrongful dismissal suit against the Ontario government that one source said asked for between $8 million and $9 million in damages.
