By Doug Draper
Ontario’s NDP leader Andrea Horwath tabled a bill at Queen’s Park this May 20, calling for a cap on the salaries and benefits of high-priced public sector executives running hospital systems, universities, colleges, hydro utilities and other tax-funded agencies in Ontario.
Why is this premier who runs the whole province making $209,000 a year?
Meanwhile, the premier of Ontario is making $209,000 a year. Say what you want about Dalton McGuinty. But that is what he is getting paid for running the whole province! Compare that to Debbie Sevenpifer, CEO of the Niagara Health System, who is making $345,000 for arguably mismanaging most of the hospital sites falling under her shadow in the Niagara region.
The bill Horwath has tabled, if it gets passed (and unfortunately it probably has a snowball’s chance in late spring of getting passed with this government, would apply to all public sector executives who are subject to the annual ‘sunshine list’ – that list of publicly funded officials at the provincial and municipal level, and at other public
Why, on the other hand, is this CEO for the Niagara Health System making $345,000 a year?
bodies, including educational institutions – reporting the yearly wages and benefits of all those making more than $100,000.
“Until we have a clear, uniform cap on public salaries, Ontarians can expect to see the pay packets of public executives continue to grow at the expense of public service,” Horwath said.
It will be interesting to see how much support Horwath’s bill gets in the provincial legislature. Will the province’s Conservative leader, Tim Hudak, support it? Will any of the McGuinty’s Liberal backbenchers? We shall wait and see.
(Click on www.niagaraatlarge.com at Niagara At Large for more news and commentary on this and other matters of interest and concern to our greater binational Niagara region.)
Niagara At Large 
It wont be easy for Medicare to rid itself of business-types like NHS’s CEO Sevenpifer. Most will have to be paid off to leave. Then, a return to specialized nurses &/or doctors as hospital administrators must be aimed for – and bit by bit achieved. Proper hospital admin is a prestigious and honourable job. Traditionally, service and care are an integral part of the bottom line. The basic job pays about half of what a practising GP earns – still a respectable income. How so? The blunt reality is that hours are 9-5, an office is provided along with support staff and retirement benefits. (These things the front-line nurse practitioner or doctor must plan and pay pay for alone, hence the discrepancy.) Doctors and nurses who train to run hospitals in the tradition of genuine patient care are respected by front-line practitioners and they all industriously work closely together to keep costs within reason. I am not imagining some utopia. It happens. (The Fort Erie hospital was a case in point; it balanced its books.) The interlopers from big business, who have greedily perverted the once hallowed medical and nursing tradition of delivering caring service to patients, and thereby have ruined many of our hospitals, should be bid to go on their way, the faster the better, to be replaced by the right people. It can be done.
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The Harrisites (parasites) created this Frankenstein monster, NHS, and the McGuintyites refined it by adding on the LHINs a huge trough filled with our health dollars for the piggies to get their snoughts in,and to hell with providing any health care for us the poor slobs that pay for this obscenity with the new health tax I am so angry I could spit nails.
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