EHealth bonuses show ‘lack of respect’
Opposition parties say extra pay makes mockery of Liberals’ austerity talk
The $2.3 million in performance pay for eHealth Ontario workers is further proof the province needs a total wage freeze for public sector workers as it fights an $11.7-billion deficit, the Progressive Conservatives say.
“When you see long lineups for food cards after the ice storm, I think people are going to have a hard time stomaching these bonuses,” Conservative MPP Michael Harris said Friday.
The eHealth payouts, first reported in the Star, will go out next Friday to 704 of the agency’s 875 workers, who will get between $500 and $7,000 each.
Premier Kathleen Wynne’s minority Liberal government has defended the pay for performance as “commensurate” with bonuses paid previously to eHealth workers after they won a settlement in a class-action lawsuit filed over the axing of promised merit raises and bonuses in 2011.
The agency, which is in charge of developing electronic health records for all Ontarians by 2015, said the pay for meeting performance targets is necessary because it is in the same market as private sector employers for information technology experts.
“We recruit from a very competitive environment,” said eHealth spokesman Rob Mitchell.
The trouble is that Ontario is going deeper into debt every day with the Liberal government not promising to eliminate the deficit for another three years, said Harris (KitchenerConestoga), whose party has promised a public sector wage freeze like the one MPPs are under.
“We’re putting this on the credit card,” he said in a telephone interview from his riding. “We need to restrain government spending and we would treat all government employees equally and fairly by freezing all pay across the board.”
New Democrat health critic France Gelinas said the bonuses make a mockery of austerity talk from the government, which could face an election as early as this spring if the NDP doesn’t support its budget again. “The government makes announcements about zero pay increases and has no follow-through. It shows a lack of respect,” said the MPP for the Sudbury-area riding of Nickel Belt.
“All they were interested in was getting the headline.
“It burns. There are lots of front line health care workers who got a wage freeze.”
Bonuses at eHealth, which was the subject of a 2009 expense account scandal, became a political hot potato in 2011 when the Star revealed employees had been promised merit increases and performance pay.
Former premier Dalton McGuinty’s government cancelled the payouts with an election looming, prompting employees to file an $11-million class action lawsuit settled a year ago for $7.16 million.
Wynne’s administration has said it will introduce legislation within the next two or three months controlling the pay of senior executives in the public service, including caps on their salaries.