Matthews pondered cutting off ORNGE

Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews contemplated cutting off ORNGE’S funding when she heard there were serious concerns at the ambulance service but she worried patient care would be jeopardized so she refused to do it.

Matthews made those comments Thursday, a day after she first stunned a legislative hearing probing the ORNGE scandal by saying she was powerless to take action against the troubled entity because it was a federally incorporated charity.

“We cannot pass legislation in the Ontario Legislature that impacts federally incorporated organizations,” she told reporters on Thursday and added the government is hunting for other agencies that may be in the same situation.

Since ORNGE is federally incorporated, Matthews said she didn’t have the legal powers to remove the board and take over the service after she discovered serious compensation irregularities.

But, after a series of investigative articles in the Star, Matthews told the board of directors, many of whom were paid “retainers” as high as $200,000, that their “house of cards was about to fall.”

The board eventually resigned, but before that happened, the ministry did consider cutting funding to ORNGE.

“We did have a number of options. Stopping the money was one, but thankfully we didn’t have to use that tool because the board resigned,” Matthews told reporters.

“Had the board not resigned,” she said, “it would have been an option we would have looked at but it would have been one I would be loathe to use because I would be concerned with patient safety.”

Hearings began on the scandal at the financially based legislative public accounts committee on Wednesday.

Matthews, high level Health Ministry bureaucrats, ORNGE executives and members of the premier’s office are all under fire for who knew what and when at the agency.

Last week, auditor general Jim Mccarter issued a searing indictment of the province’s lack of oversight at ORNGE. He discovered Ontario threw $50 million in funding increases at the service over five years but never checked how the money was being spent.

The hearings continue next week with former health minister George Smitherman, Premier Dalton Mcguinty’s principal secretary, Jamison Steeve, and others.

Progressive Conservative MPP Peter Shurman called Matthews’ latest explanation about ORNGE being federally incorporated a ruse to avoid the question of when she first knew about the problems and when she acted.

And Frances Gelinas, the New Democratic Party MPP for Nickel Belt, said Matthews’ explanation that she was powerless due to ORNGE’S federal incorporation “means nothing.”

“Your fiscal status has nothing to do with your relationship with your funder.”