A Year Later, Where Are The Goods On Sevenpifer?

 A Commentary by Doug Draper

It may seem hard to believe given how much Debbie Sevenpifer loomed in the lives of Niagara, Ontario residents for far to long, but a whole year has now passed since her sudden departure from the top job at the Niagara Health System.

 Only a few months before she disappeared like a ghost in the night last January, the NHS board, including Betty-Lou Souter, Paul Leon and company (all now thankfully gone following the appointment of Kevin Smith last September as NHS supervisor,) were continuing to boast about what a superlative job she was doing.

Then suddenly and shamelessly, Souter and others were telling us that she was out, not because she did anything wrong, but because the hospital system was at a “crossroads” and could stand to have new leadership. What we, the residents of this region whose taxes go to pay for this costly empire have never been told, were the real reasons why she was let go and how much of our money she received from us a severance pay or for all we know of the transaction, a golden parachute.

To have us believe that Sevenpifer’s hand-picked sycophants suddenly woke up one day and said it is time to let her go is an insult to her intelligence.

We have learned since Sevenpifer’s departure that at least one of the rumours about her was true, that she, according to a letter Smith sent to Niagara regional councillor Andy Petrowski last September, had a trip to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, courtesy of the RICOH corporation that has a contract with the NHS for photocopying machines. At the very least, the NHS should have demanded that the cost of that trip be paid by Sevenpifer to the taxpayers of Niagara and Ontario!

But we don’t know any of the particulars of the reasons for Sevenpifer’s departure and how much it cost us now, do we? And let’s keep in mind, this was a person working for a publicly funded institution that was making more than $350,00 per year. We are not talking about someone working for a private company where, if we asked why she disappeared, the company, owned by private investors, could get away with telling us it is none of our business.

Kevin Smith was appointed in the late summer of last year to take over the supervision of this messed up hospital system and he promised there would be more openness and transparency, and there has been more. It would not be hard to offer more openness to the public given the curtain of blatant campaign of misinformation and selective, self-serving dishes we were served by Sevenpifer and her board before.

It would do Smith and the NHS well to elevate the level of public trust in the Niagara Health System – a trust that was going down the sewer, according to a professional public survey released this past fall – by disclosing the real reasons for the departure of Sevenpifer and how much we may still be paying her in severance pay and benefits.

After all, this was an individual who was at the top of the NHS foodchain when it made its controversial decisions to site the only new hospital complex for which this region will likely receive provincial funding for decades to come on an old farm field in west St. Catharines rather than on a more central site in the Niagara region. She also presided over and adamantly defended a controversial ‘hospital improvement plan’ that saw the closing of emergency rooms at hospitals in Fort Erie and Port Colborne and may very well see most of the acute care services in Niagara, including maternity, etc., leaving hospitals in Welland and Port Colborne, and going to that west St. Catharines complex when it opens in another year.

Are those not good enough reasons for Smith and the provincial government to grant the taxpayers of Niagara and Ontario some answers when it comes to the why Sevenpifer left and what her severance package is costing us?

By the way, and I am not going to repeat the arguments in a recent post I wrote on this, we should be entitled to the same information with respect to the departure of six other senior NHS executives this January.

If you are promising we, the people, more openness and accountability, it must go beyond rhetoric. Do it!

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