TORONTO - Ontario Health Minister David Caplan rejected calls for his resignation Monday over a spending scandal at embattled eHealth Ontario, a day after its top executive was abruptly removed from her job.

The agency, which is tasked with creating electronic health records, has come under fire for questionable spending and awarding nearly $5 million in untendered contracts.

Sarah Kramer's appointment as the agency's president and CEO was revoked Sunday amid the public outcry over eHealth, which allowed high-paid consultants to bill taxpayers for minor purchases like tea and snacks.

Undaunted, the opposition parties turned up the heat on Caplan, demanding Monday that he resign for mishandling eHealth.

"Forty-billion dollar ministry ... and we have a minister who stands on the sidelines and does nothing when millions of dollars are given out in contracts not tendered," charged NDP health critic France Gelinas.

"This is too much of a big portfolio to have someone who doesn't have any fiscal accountability. If he doesn't do this with this agency, what leads you to believe that the other $40 billion is being well looked after?"

Caplan defended his record, saying he's made efforts to restore public faith in eHealth and asked Auditor General Jim McCarter to speed his probe of the agency's practices.

"I just want to be very clear: I'm going to see our electronic health records program move forward and I remain dedicated to that goal," he said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

"I've taken action to ensure that eHealth can move forward amid the valid concerns and questions that have been raised."

Opposition parties have repeatedly called for Caplan and Kramer's resignations in recent weeks, accusing her and eHealth board chairman Alan Hudson of giving Liberal-friendly firms lucrative contracts without taking competitive bids.

One consulting firm that received an untendered contract charged eHealth for such tasks as reading newspaper articles, reviewing voice-mail messages and talking shop during a subway ride.

Outrage grew after it was discovered that Kramer was paid a $114,000 bonus on top of her $380,000 salary after just a few months on the job.

Caplan at first defended the bonus, saying it's what Kramer would have received at her previous job at Cancer Care Ontario. But he quickly changed his tune late last week after the provincial agency said Kramer's bonus would have been about $40,000 had she stayed.

The government said Kramer and the eHealth board came to a "mutual agreement" over the weekend that she would leave the organization.

"Both the board and Ms. Kramer feel that a change in leadership is required to restore public confidence in the organization's ability to move our important mandate forward," Hudson said in a letter to Caplan.

"Therefore, Ms. Kramer has decided to leave the organization."

She'll also receive nearly $317,000 in compensation -- a move that's outraged critics, who are vowing to keep up the pressure on Caplan to resign.

"If he thinks and the premier thinks this issue is going to go away, they're badly mistaken," said interim Progressive Conservative Leader Bob Runciman.

"He failed to carry out his responsibilities to make sure tax dollars were spent appropriately."

Both Caplan and Premier Dalton McGuinty have insisted that no rules were broken in awarding the untendered contracts, which were allowed because of the "urgency" of eHealth's task -- even though the province's deadline for electronic health records is 2015.

Those are just "weasel words," said Runciman, whose party uncovered the untendered contracts through a freedom of information request.

"Here we are in the most dire circumstances historically for the province, in terms of the (up to $18.5-billion) deficit, in terms of the hundreds of thousands of jobs that have been lost -- 60,000 just last month," he said.

"And for him to suggest that technically, they're OK, should offend every Ontarian."

The eHealth board, including Hudson, should also take responsibility for the "abuse" of public money, he said.

Government officials point out that tougher contract procurement rules have been in place at eHealth since late March. Deputy health minister Ron Sapsford -- who helped draft those rules -- has been installed as temporary CEO of eHealth.

EHealth was established last fall after the first provincial agency tasked with creating electronic health records, Smart Systems for Health, spent about $650 million but failed to produce anything of value before it was quietly shut down.

The predecessor to eHealth spent 15 per cent of its $225-million annual budget on consultants, even though it employed 166 people with annual salaries exceeding $100,000.

Both McGuinty and Caplan said it's tough to recruit top experts to build a provincewide electronic health records system when President Barack Obama is pushing a similar project in the U.S.

The U.S. is investing $50 billion over five years on e-health, while Ontario expects to spend another $2 billion on the project over the next three years.