Smitherman exempted ORNGE

Air ambulance service spinoff done without bids, Matthews says

The spinoff of the troubled ORNGE air ambulance service was done without competitive bidding thanks to an exemption sought by then-health minister George Smitherman, says Deb Matthews, Ontario’s current minister of health.

Smitherman’s move eventually enabled the assets to be handed over to an organization headed by Dr. Chris Mazza, who has since been sacked.

“That was the decision that was made,” Matthews said Tuesday, adding that the deal was not subject to a request for proposals (RFP) from prospective operators of air ambulances in 2005.

“There was an amendment passed in the Legislature that gave the minister authority to establish this.”

Asked if the unusual move, which appears to contravene traditional government practices on bidding, was approved by Smitherman and was solely for ORNGE, Matthews said: “Yes. George.” Opposition parties noted a lack of competitive bidding is also what led to the spending scandal uncovered at ehealth Ontario after Smitherman left the health portfolio. Consultants at the electronic health records agency earned as much as $3,000 a day, yet expensed tea and cookies to taxpayers. Speaking from China, Smitherman said: “An RFP would have been used if we were interested in outsourcing but we were not.” “Could you imagine the hue and cry if I had moved to put Ontario’s air ambulance out to tender?” he told the Star. “In that model we could have had the Australians running the sys- tem,” said Smitherman, emphasizing he “inherited” Mazza from the previous Conservative government, which had begun consolidation of air ambulance services. As the scandal and OPP investigation into financial irregularities at ORNGE have shown, that plan didn’t work out so well because there wasn’t enough government oversight, said Progressive Conservative MPP Frank Klees. “When you avoid a competitive, open, fair bidding process, you open the door for what has happened at ORNGE and ehealth,” said Klees, his party’s transportation critic. NDP health critic France Gelinas noted that Mazza, a former emer- gency room doctor at Sunnybrook hospital, was “hand-picked.”

ORNGE set up a web of for-profit companies to capitalize on the $150 million a year the air ambulance service got from Ontario taxpayers. In one instance now under police scrutiny, ORNGE was paid $6.7 million in “marketing services” by its Italian helicopter supplier, Agustawestland.

In July 2005, Smitherman described the new ORNGE as a notfor-profit, government-funded service to “streamline our air ambulance system to better ensure that emergency coverage improves across the province, especially in northern and rural communities.”