Ontario Families Paying for LHIN's 'Magical Gathering'

TORONTO, Aug. 25 /CNW/ -

NEWS:

Just weeks after getting caught withholding important pathology error information from the public and admitting to hosting 'secret' and 'illegal' meetings, Dalton McGuinty's Erie-St. Clair Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) has wasted $10,900 to hire two employees from Disney to deliver a 90-minute presentation to LHIN bureaucrats. This works out to a speaking fee of $7,266 per hour.

The Disney presentation is part of the Erie-St. Clair's conference, which is being held at the swanky Caesars Casino in Windsor this September. Conference organizers estimate 400 health bureaucrats will attend the one-day conference at a cost of $125 each. In addition to the estimated $50,000 in registration fees, Ontario families can also expect to pick up the tab for hotel rooms, meal and travel expenses.

Tim Hudak and the Ontario PC Caucus are calling on Dalton McGuinty to ensure not one healthcare dollar is wasted on a Disney seminar. As Premier, Hudak will eliminate Dalton McGuinty's wasteful and scandal-plagued LHIN bureaucracy and reinvest the health care dollars they waste back into frontline patient care.

QUOTES:

"Dalton McGuinty's secretive, unaccountable LHINs continue to waste healthcare dollars while contributing nothing to frontline health care. The real 'Quest for Quality' begins with scrapping the LHINs, not a Disney's magical gathering for LHIN bureaucrats."
-Norm Miller, Ontario PC Finance Critic

"Dalton McGuinty's LHIN bureaucrats are already well experienced in running a Mickey Mouse operation. They've been mismanaging and wasting hundreds of millions of Ontario healthcare dollars for years."
-Norm Miller, Ontario PC Finance Critic

QUICK FACTS:

• To date, Dalton McGuinty's LHIN bureaucracies have wasted $250 million health care dollars on salaries and administration, handed out $7 million health care dollars in untendered contracts and wasted $250 million on an Aging at Home strategy that failed to reduce long-term care and alternate-level-of-care wait times.
• In just four years, the number of executives at the Erie-St. Clair LHIN making more than $100,000 per year has more than doubled with over $1,057,000 local health care dollars now being diverted to their salaries alone. This includes the Erie-St. Clair LHIN CEO who has been handed $98,000 in raises during this time.

For further information:

Sarah McMaster
416-325-8505
[email protected]