By Doug Draper, Niagara At Large
Boy oh boy, the already well-endowed in the high-paid stratosphere really know how to look after their own, don’t they? Don’t you wish you could wander in to some six-figure deal for yourself– all at the taxpayer’s expense?
Niagara, Ontario's 2011 'Sunshine Girl' Debbie Sevenpifer. File photo by Doug Draper
Take the case of Debbie Sevenpifer, now the former chief executive officer or CEO, of the Niagara Health System, the former Ontario Conservative government amalgamated body now responsible for most of the hospital services in Niagara, Ontario. In other words, take the case of someone who, just this past year, ran a hospital organization that experienced a disproportionately high number of C-diff deaths in the country and was subject last year to a professional survey of Niagara residents on its performance that was almost as negative in the responses received from the public as that done on Tyoto when its car’s were receiving world-side headlines for catastrophic accelerator-peddle failtures.
If some of you are still wondering if the upper one or couple of per cent of those on the economic foodchain are treated differently than the rest of us schmucks, the latiest ‘Sunshine List’ of salaries and benefits released by the Ontario government show that Sevenpifer capped off her subsidized trip to the Vancouver Winter Olympics a few years back with a total payout last year of more than $620,000, including taxable benefits. Try to find a better deal for train wreck of a time at one of our most important jobs – looking after the proper running of our hospitals than that.
Since Sevenpifers annual salary was hovering around $350,000 until she was suddenly taken off life support more than a year ago by an unelected Niagara Health System board that also, thankfully, no longer exists, it may be assumed that the extra, more than a quarter of a million of dollars reported in the latest Sunshine List made up part, if not all of her golden kiss-off. Since those now running this rancid excuse for a hospital system still won’t tell us what Sevenpifer’s buyout was, we will have to tap in to next year’s Sunshine list, and perhaps the one after that, to get the rest of the story.
By the way, we can ultimately thank the province’s health minister, Deb Matthews, and the premier she works for, Premier Dalton McGuinty, for the back-door gift Sevenpifer and some of her other friends who have been fired out of the NHS in the last year and a half or so got.
How many times have we heard McGuinty and Matthews go on record saying what a great job these people were doing, even when countless thousands members of the Niagara public were petitioning them to the contrary? How many times have we seen their point man in the provincial riding of St. Catharines, the honourable Jim Bradley, doing photo opportunities with them for The St. Catharines Standard, a newspaper that has had a history of ignoring citizen critics and kissing Sevenpifer and company’s derrieres?
Sue Salzer, a Fort Erie, Ontario resident and head of the citizens group, the Yellow Shirts Brigade, fighting for better quality hospital services in Niagara, responded to the generous money listed beside Sevenpifer’s name in the latest Sunshite list this way: “The Health Care system in Niagara has been so dysfunctional that it comes as no surprise that one of their inner circle was well cared for as they gave Sevenpifer a sweetheart kiss goodbye.” said Salzer. “If only the patients on waiting lists, awaiting attention for hours in the Emergency Rooms, and suffering from hospital acquired infections were the front-line recipients of the same care, attention and funding as a deposed administrator.”
“The people of Niagara have been crying foul for three years,” concluded Salzer, “and still we await action and not platitudes. We just saw where some of the money they claim to save by our hospital service closures is gone, and once again we will continue to demand equal and accessible health care.”
Yet Sevenpifer, who apparently now serves on the Board of Governors at Niagara College (God Bless Niagara College), is only one of the individuals on the latest Sunshine list of public servants released by the province’s Ministy of Finance.
You may have your favourites that you would like to give mention to other than the person who has temporarily replaced Sevenpifer – one Kevin Smith who was the CEO at St. Joseph’s Healthcare System in the Hamilton area, and logged in at more than $620,000 in salaries and benefits there before taking on the NHS mess as a provincially appointed supervisor. (By the way, if any of you watched, didn’t he come off looking like the man ultimately in charge of controlling infectious filth at Niagara’s hospitals in one of the latest segments of CBC’s Marketplace?)
Perhaps you would like to tell Niagara At Large about your own favourite person in or around this region on the province’s latest Sunshine list. If so, check out the list by clicking on http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/publications/salarydisclosure/2012/ and name the individual, their salary and benefits in the comment boxes below, and tell us why you picked them for a little extra exposure. Please remember that Niagara At Large will only post your comments if they are not libelious and they are linked to your real first and last name._
(Niagara At Large welcomes you to share your views on this post. Please remember that we only post comments by people willing to share their real first and last names.)
Niagara At Large 
And Draper tells it the way it is…Niagara is so very tired of paying more and getting the short end of the stick.
LikeLike
It is often said that we have to pay these outrageous and fancy wages so that we can attract the best people out there, so why if they are so great at what they do, is the system broken with a huge body count ,and why where no Doctors available on that fateful day in St Catharines in March when my great grandchild was still born in the washroom at Hotel Dieu 24 hours and no help. and I have heard of numerous horror stories,My grandson still has disbelief how that could have happened.and depressed at the outcome. I wan’t him to sue the NHS but he is afraid of the system.I believe Doctors and nurses save lives, not bureauxcrats.and paper pushers.
LikeLike
How obviously wrong & bordering criminal can what is happening to our Health System be?? People should be up in arms & hounding the gov’t to rectify the mess that has left many without decent care that their tax dollars contribute to and our laws which should be in place to step up and correct the horrible travesties that continue to happen!! We don’t need more studies, we need a plan to dig deep & get rid of the dead wood , not hire more people whose salaries will keep draining the system leaving the peope in need still needing & the people of greed ,still GREEDING!!!!
LikeLike
Thanks Anne I have been away mentally but now ready for the next challenge-you have fought hard and Imust renew my subscrition to this Guardian for the people or is it of the people?
LikeLike
Since the CBC Marketplace investigative expose pointed out how all NHS hospitals are still not being cleaned right, even after the C.difficile outbreak, rather than pay Sevenpifer over $600,000 for sitting home, why not put her to work doing necessary cleaning? She would probably do a better job of that than CEO.
LikeLike
Pat, I’ve tried to imagine any administrator doing cleaning, but perhaps Dr. Smith could give it a go for a week. Cleaning a hospital is dangerous and very important work and the cleaners should have a good wage. Will the NHS ever be safe?
LikeLike
If higher wages attract the best and brightest why on God’s green earth did we get stuck with people like her. Clowns like Sevenfigures get fired and a sweet severance. If we had been fired from our jobs, we would just be escorted out the door! Since when does one get a reward for getting fired?
As with all burro-crats, she just moves on to another lucrative post where she can continue to exercise her “expertise” wasting tax payers’ money. Ain’t it just grand?!
LikeLike
Lynda, It should be seven fingers not sevenfigures as she gave each site aka hospital a middle finger. Glenn
LikeLike
Dear Mr. Draper,
I would like respond to your excellent article under your title ‘Ontario’s Latest Sunshine List Shows Ups Former NHS CEO Debbie Sevenpifer As Niagara’s Sunshine Girl’ posted March 24, 2012.
Please note that the first line of CBC Marketplace expose´ re: ‘Dirty Hospitals’ it says: Canada has the highest rate of hospital acquired infections in the developed world. So much for the reputation of government run healthcare. Political and bureaucratic greed and mismanagement is out of control. Extraordinary and excessive management salaries have absolutely robbed our health system of its vital resources. Excessive pay would be at least a little more understandable for successful performance but is criminal on the part of the Liberal Government of Ontario to spend $Millions of hard earned taxpayer’s dollars to reward failure.
It’s not just the fault of cleaning staff! Note the reasons given for lack of hygiene. And please note the short length of time it took the CBC to identify the problem. This goes to my point that it is mismanagement that is the root cause of the problem.
Mr. Draper, the problem is not going to go away! The problems are just going to continue to be swept under the rug by McGuinty’s Government and his handpicked lackeys.
This disgusting performance is predicated on the lack of competition. The leading healthcare system, according the World Health Organization, is France were their public health system must compete with 20% private healthcare.
For those who may have missed the program, it can be viewed in its entirety by clicking here: http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/2012/dirtyhospitals/
LikeLike
Just so we don’t confuse informed comment with bs beating brains, let’s be clear on the private versus public health care front. The survey Haskell cites, making France number one, was done in 2000. And even if it’s still valid (highly unlikely), the point that it is because of the 20% private competition holds no water. If private competition made for a better health care system, why was the U.S. number 37 in the same survey? There are lots of points on which our health care can be improved, but knee-jerk ideological reaction to a situation does nothing to advance the debate or provide solutions.
At least Haskell writes better than Draper, whose material is riddled with errors. It’s hard to take seriously a writer who knows so little about his craft.
A response from NAL publisher Doug Draper – I challenge the above writer, Brian Green, to show where my information on former NHS CEO Debbie Sevenpifer receiving an extraordinary amount of money, as shown through the lates Sunshine list, was wrong, and why I can’t take that allocation of taxpayers’ money to task when the person in question was summarily dismissed by the NHS board. Since Green went out of his way to insult me by suggesting my work is “riddled with errors” and I know little about the craft that I have sought to keep the integrity of for more than 30 years, let me tell him that I think he is full of shit. If he goes along with the Sevenpifer buy-off, he is on a planet of his own with a few other people.
LikeLike
I don’t think it’s right that the CEO’s of government departments make more than a prime minister. The line that “we have to offer high compensation to
get the best people for these positions”, (my quote) I think, cannot be proven. Why should the CEO of a hospital get a bonus? Do the cleaners, kitchen workers, nurses, techs also get bonuses for doing their jobs correctly? It just seems wrong that the CEO would receive so much money for doing what she or he is supposed to be doing. Without sounding like an old fart, but I do remember the time when the hospital administrators were admired by their community. How times have changed.
LikeLike
I have been mulling this over,and I think what we have now, is a classical case of the trickle down theory of Prez Ronald Reagan, the top gets the cream and the rest drips down to the bottom, the crumbs at the bottom can not sustain a mouse, So they lay off the cleaning staff, get rid of beds and get rid of the Doctors and nurses and voila the problem is solved, maybe the trickle up would be a better solution , and could fix this crazy system the money going into the frontline and sucess would make everybody happy.and then bonuses to those that deserve them.
LikeLike
The Health Care System in Ontario is already ‘NOW’ partially privatized and these government clowns are pushing the system further down the road into the hands of “For Profit” health merchants. As for Mr. Bradley his involvement in the NHS photo ops are historical but the one I liked the best is when He, Sevenpifer and the Board’s Chairperson rode a float around the City of St Catharines standing inside a giant mock up of an annus.
I did not vote these Provincial Liberal clowns into office “AGAIN” but many did and one usually gets what they deserve????
LikeLike
Actually, I was surprised Sevenpifer’s severance was so low. It is out of character for the NHS to be so miserly with their own, even those that have fallen from grace.
LikeLike
Whoo hoo, Doug. Way to go. What an eclectic array of responses!
LikeLike
Maybe Debbie should volunteer with my Debbie , recreation young lady at our Douglas Memorial Hospital. We need all the help we can get trying to keep our residents and the out of town residents happy, occuppied, exercised and what ever-so tomorrow I’d like to see her about 11am Do you think she needs a volunteer badge or maybe a relative of hers is in now-just maybe, It’s nice to earn money, I wonder how it feels to be given something you honestly feel you didn’t earn Just a hypothetical question!!
LikeLike
Dear Brian Green,
I’m sorry if I did not make myself clear. The point that I was trying to make was the fact that competition generally improves and advances a situation. The point that I was trying to make is that healthcare can be improved through competition.
I did not mean that we should consider the U.S. health system which so many like to point to as #37th.
You say; ‘There are lots of points on which our health care can be improved’. I agree and I have made a suggestion. So instead of berating others, why the hell don’t YOU do something ‘to advance the debate’?
In my opinion our healthcare will lag and is lagging simply because our system is lacking in ‘not for profit’ as well as a dearth of ‘private competition’.
You asked, ‘If private competition made for a better healthcare system, why was the U.S. number 37 in the same survey?
Perhaps you should ask why Canada was rated #30 in that same survey and also in the 2011 survey.
The U.S. placement and grade in healthcare is not based on the quality of their healthcare, which is world class, but on their cost. But don’t worry our system is catching up as the 2011 WHO survey clearly illustrates: http://en.wikipedia.org wiki/World_Health_Organization_ranking_of_health_systems
Anyway, Mr. Green, France is still rated #1 in healthcare and you can still be thrilled with what WE HAVE.
LikeLike