MUHC CEO is highest paid in province
$15,000-a-year housing allowance is ‘part of the package,’ Gfeller says
Dr. Pierre Gfeller, the new CEO of the financially strapped McGill University Health Centre, is the highest-paid hospital administrator in the province after having negotiated a nearly $15,000-a-year housing allowance, the Montreal Gazette has learned.
Gfeller is the sole hospital administrator in Quebec to receive the housing benefit — a rare perk among the highest-echelon civil servants.
When Gfeller headed the health organization of the CIUSSS du Nord-de-l’Île-de-Montréal prior to assuming the top job at the MUHC on May 28, he was not paid the $1,225 monthly housing allowance, according to government records.
Gfeller is tied with four other hospital administrators in earning $311,812 this year — the maximum salary for the position known as PDG1. However, the other four health-care executives, including Dr. Fabrice Brunet of the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM), do not collect a housing allowance, government records show. Add Gfeller’s allowance to his salary and his MUHC annual income rises to $326,512.
Gfeller, who is 61, told the Gazette he deserves the housing allowance because his home is in the Laurentian village of Nominingue, 160 kilometres north of Montreal.
Rather than commute to the MUHC, Gfeller said, he decided to rent an apartment close to his new office at the Glen site superhospital in Notre-Dame-de- Grâce.
“I accept to work far from my home, and for many civil servants and for members of the National Assembly, that’s simply the rule (granting a housing allowance), and it’s known by everyone and it’s public,” Gfeller explained.
“That’s part of the package that’s provided to high civil servants all over Quebec.”
A total of 345 senior civil servants are responsible this year for running almost 140 provincial agencies, departments, commissions and institutions — among them, Quebec’s pension fund manager, Hydro- Québec and the Directeur général des élections. Just under 10 per cent — or 34 civil servants, counting Gfeller — were allocated the housing allowance, a taxable benefit at the federal level on top of their salaries. The allowances must be issued by government decree, and their number is up from 28 in 2017.
During Health Minister Gaétan Barrette’s cost-cutting administrative reforms, hundreds of hospital administrators lost their jobs across the province. Most retired, but others applied for newly created positions and some had to relocate for new jobs.
Amy Ma, co-president of the MUHC Central Users’ Committee, said “the optics don’t look good” that Gfeller is the only hospital administrator in the province to be paid a housing allowance that will amount to nearly $59,000 over the four years of his term.
“I just find it unacceptable that on the one hand we’ve had to do without things at the MUHC like patient education and the cancer survivorship program,” Ma said, “and on the other hand (Gfeller) is getting a six-figure salary from which he can well afford to rent his own pied-à-terre, and he’s also getting this housing allowance.”
“It’s difficult to reconcile after the whole debacle with SNC-Lavalin and the MUHC having to pay half-a-million dollars in rent every year,” Ma added, alluding to lease payments the public hospital network is making for some unused space to the private consortium in charge of the superhospital.
Patient-rights advocate Paul G. Brunet, of the Conseil pour la protection des malades, said he’s not against Gfeller’s housing allowance or salary, as long as he does a good job and makes patients his priority.
“Let’s see if he accomplishes the job of being patient-oriented at the MUHC,” Brunet said.
Gfeller said in a previous interview that the MUHC has enough resources to take care of all its patients, a position that did not sit well with members of the users’ committee and some managers who insist the institution is underfunded.
Gfeller added in the interview that he hopes to restore trust and confidence in the MUHC after “difficult days” — a reference, in part, to the scandal involving the awarding of the $1.3-billion construction contract for the superhospital. The late Arthur Porter, the former CEO of the MUHC, was accused of taking $22.5 million in bribes in exchange for influencing the bidding process to make sure the contract would go to the consortium headed by SNC-Lavalin.
Porter quit the MUHC in December 2011. The Montreal Gazette attempted at the time to obtain details of Porter’s compensation package by filing an access-to-information request, but the MUHC rejected it. Two years later, on the day of an appeal hearing before Quebec’s access-to-information commission, the MUHC revealed the details of Porter’s remuneration: a $241,000 base salary, an “on-call indemnity” of more than $63,000 as well as a $59,000 down payment on a Bentley that required $17,000 a year in lease payments.
Porter also drew a salary to teach at McGill, but professors in the faculty of medicine never recalled seeing him give lectures or meet with students.
Since the Porter scandal, the government has tightened the rules on the compensation of senior hospital administrators, and has become more transparent in making public the salaries of all the top civil servants.
Richard Fahey, director of communications at the MUHC, said that Gfeller does not receive an on-call premium. He added that Gfeller, as head of the MUHC, is entitled to an annual “frais de fonction,” or expense account of $4,830.
The Ontario government makes public its own annual so-called sunshine list of highest-paid civil servants, many of whom earn far more than their Quebec counterparts. For instance, Dr. Peter Pisters, the former CEO of the University Health Network in Toronto (a city with housing costs double Montreal’s), earned a salary of $718,300 last year, plus taxable benefits of $73,157.