09-05-2025
Contracts kept secret despite call from privacy czar to publish
When the
taxpayer
is footing the bill, contracts are supposed to be public.
In fact, Brian Beamish, Ontario's former Information and Privacy Commissioner, called on the public sector in
2015
'to proactively publish contracting information so that the public may scrutinize the spending of government funds.'
But 10 years later, there is little transparency around contracts signed with
private agencies
that increasingly supply staff to the Canadian health-care system at a high cost.
Ontario's former Information and Privacy Commissioner, Brian Beamish, said in 2015 that the public needs to be able to scrutinize procurement records.
The Spectator had to file a freedom-of-information (FOI) request for contracts with staffing agencies for Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) and St. Joseph's Healthcare.
The hospital networks originally refused to release the contracts in full, citing exemptions for third party information, personal privacy, and economic and other related interests.
An appeal, including mediation, was required to make contracts public that detail millions of dollars in spending on agency perfusionists, nurses and personal support workers.
In the end, it took around nine months and $240 to get five HHS contracts released. Two of those have not yet been fully provided more than one year after the FOI request was made.
St. Joseph's Healthcare, meanwhile, did not reveal the existence of all of its contracts in response to the FOI request.
An unknown number of contracts were omitted because of a troubling loophole in freedom-of-information legislation discovered by The Spectator.
While the contracts supplied workers to St. Joseph's, they were not considered responsive to the FOI request because the agreements were between the agencies and a third party.
St. Joseph's did not reveal contracts for temporary staff because the agreements were between the agencies and Mohawk Medbuy, a not-for-profit, shared services organization used by Canadian hospitals and other health-care providers for procurement and other services.
The third party was Mohawk Medbuy, a not-for-profit, shared-services organization used by Canadian hospitals and other health-care providers for procurement and other services.
As a result, The Spectator was led to believe there was only one contract to supply staff to St. Joseph's. It was the only one directly between St. Joseph's and the staffing agency without the use of
Mohawk Medbuy
.
Getting that contract released in full under FOI legislation took 10 months and an appeal, despite the agreement being with the hospital network's sister agency St. Joseph's Home Care. Both are part of the
St. Joseph's Health System
.
The existence of the other contracts was discovered through The Spectator's reporting. The hospital network has started a process to have the agreements released, but it's unknown how long it will take.
This demonstrates the difficulty of getting access to contracts when the public doesn't know where to find them. It also raises questions about whether public contracts could be kept secret if they are executed through a third party not covered by the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. (The legislation does apply to Mohawk Medbuy.)
'This is public tax money that's going towards private, for-profit agencies,' said Joan Almost, a nursing professor at Queen's University who authored a report in 2024 on the health-care system's rising reliance on staffing agencies. 'Shouldn't we know how our public money is being spent?'
The report was funded by the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions (CFNU) because publicly available data on the use of agencies was 'practically nonexistent,' it said.
It shows how little improvement has been made since 2006, when the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner first started calling for proactive disclosure, believing greater transparency would improve public trust and confidence, while also resulting in more competitive, fair and effective procurement processes that would drive better value for money.
'The public needs to be able to scrutinize procurement records to understand government decision-making and be engaged in the process,' Beamish said in 2015. 'There is little reason not to publish this essential information proactively.'
