Patients the losers in doctors’ feud

You may not know it, but your family doctor may be part of a coup attempt to seize control of the Ontario Medical Association.

The dramatic move, which will unfold on Sunday, could result in the ouster of the OMA president and five other senior executives and replacing them with hard-line dissident doctors ready to step up a fight with the provincial government over income and working conditions.

If the hostile takeover effort succeeds, patients could ultimately be the big losers.

That’s because the leaders of the internal insurgency favour increased job actions by doctors, such as refusing to accept new patients or cutting back office hours, in order to pressure Queen’s Park to accept their demands for more pay and more say on how health-care services are delivered.

At stake is the heart and soul of the OMA, the 137-year-old group that represents and lobbies on behalf of more than 41,000 practicing and retired physicians, medical students and residents across the province.

The battle will take place on Sunday at a special meeting of the OMA’s 260member elected council at a hotel near Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. The meeting was called after 25 council members submitted a letter on Jan. 11 demanding a vote on dumping the entire six-member OMA executive committee, including president Virginia Walley.

“The OMA Executive has demonstrated lack of vision, strategy and respect for member or delegate priorities,” Nadia Alam, a Georgetown family physician and OMA council member, wrote in an email to fellow council delegates urging them to support the vote.

“Despite being called out on their mistakes, the OMA Executive has done nothing to correct their course or the course of this organization,” she added. “To resolve this, we must approach the OMA with a tough, no-nonsense, business-like mentality.”

In her own email to council members, Walley said the move “would be extraordinarily disruptive to our Association, and significantly hinder the OMA’s main objective which is to return to negotiations and to further our profession’s collective best interests.”

At the heart of this feud is the OMA’s failure to reach a wage agreement with the Liberal government. The last contract expired three years ago and last August OMA members overwhelmingly rejected a tentative agreement endorsed by the OMA leadership. In December, the OMA turned down a followup government offer and suggested it would consider possible job action to back up its contract demands.

For the past year, members of two grassroots doctors’ groups, the Coalition of Ontario Doctors and Concerned Ontario Doctors, have been pressuring the OMA to get tougher with Health Minister Eric Hoskins.

They feel the profession is in crisis and that the “establishment leadership” of the OMA is ineffective, lacks respect for the members and has at times misrepresented their actions.

Interviews with doctors on both sides of the fight reveal a secret world of backroom politics, intrigue and personal attacks that few patients ever see.

The feud is filled with leaked emails, secret Facebook pages where strategy leading up to Sunday’s vote is plotted, anonymous whistleblowers within the dissidents’ own ranks who are fed up with a lack of transparency among their leaders, and bitter fights involving at least two doctors already angling to replace Walley as the next OMA president.

What’s clear, though, is that different doctors have different reasons for wanting to oust the OMA leadership.

Many have an obvious political agenda, actively supporting Conservative leader Patrick Brown and wanting to force Hoskins to resign and to defeat Premier Kathleen Wynne.

Other doctors are in it for more money and want the government to accept binding arbitration on wages. Still others favour extra-billing of patients and more private health care.

And then there are doctors whose top priority is indeed to improve patient care and don’t feel they can trust either the OMA or the government to do the right thing.

The vote on Sunday to oust the OMA executive team could be close. To succeed, the move requires the support of two-thirds of the council.

But deep divisions among the dissenters, each with their own personal agendas, are growing. The coalition unity that came together to defeat the tentative salary contract in August appears to be disintegrating. Whether it can hold together through the Sunday vote is unclear.

What is certain, though, is that there’s a message here of internal coups, infighting and petty squabbling among doctors that succeeds only in eroding public trust in the profession.

That’s why, regardless of how Sunday’s vote turns out, patients will be the real losers.