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Ontario’s Auditor General has slammed the Liberal government for their poor decision making and mismanagement.
Today the auditor issued a report that’s full of examples of wasteful spending, including millions of dollars to repair sub-par road maintenance work and transit projects.
The Auditor General, Bonnie Lysyk has exposed a list of ways the Liberals are using Ontarians tax dollars recklessly. In her two-volume 1000 page report she outlines millions spent to repair cracking highways, billions on an electronic medical record system that is still incomplete and that taxpayers footed the bill for millions in partisan government advertising.
She says the government paid highway contractors $8 million a year in bonuses for low quality work. Despite their shoddy efforts, those same contractors were awarded additional construction projects- like the company that installed a bridge truss upside down across the 401 in Pickering. They were hired for another $39 million project afterwards.
“I think the decision making needs to be what would a person on the street, like us, would think about somebody getting five tries and still getting it wrong every single time.”
Minister of Transportation, Steven Del Duca says he is demanding an action plan in the next 60 days to address the concerns but disagrees with the auditor’s findings on bonuses.
“We have measures in place in some of our contracts to provide additional incentives when some of the contractors are exceeding components within the contract, when they fail to meet that standard there are consequences that flow.”
According to Lysyk, five highway paving projects cost millions more than they should have. The asphalt was expected to last 15 years but began to crack after only three.
“It cost another $23 million in addition to the $143 million to fix the situation.”
Forty cents of every Ontario tax dollar goes to health-care. Eight billion dollars has been spent over the past 14 years to implement electronic health records but the initiative is still not complete.
The auditor also found that nearly half of the patients at three hospitals who should have received emergency surgery within two to eight hours had to wait 18.
And the report concluded that the Ministry of Health did not investigate billings for nine specialists who claimed to work more than 360 days of the year, including six who billed for the full 366 of that leap year. Minister Hoskins is looking into the matter.
“We need to strengthen our mechanism for both identifying those billings and recouping. We owe that to the taxpayers of this province.”
The opposition took the Liberals to task.
“Today the Auditor General paints the picture of a tired and negligent government incapable of providing the most basic services that the people of Ontario expect from their government.” said Vic Fedeli.
The auditor says since her last report 75% of her previous recommendations have been implemented.
The cap-and-trade program was also included in the report. Coming into effect January 1st, it will cost businesses and households $8 billion over the next three years and will likely generate less than 20% of the governments emission reduction targets.
