Oh, yes. Her salary was something like $400,000.
The point is, after a couple of years it was decided that she was not an efficient chief executive officer so the hospital let her go. It gave her a $1.8 million golden handshake. It absorbed in one fell swoop all the money that had been raised by the various hospital association charitable foundations. They are out there doing telethons raising money to try to buy x-ray machines and that kind of thing and that money goes to a golden handshake for an executive it is trying to unload. It is the same situation around the province.
In fact, in a recent article from my local newspaper it is suggesting that not only is the Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation in difficulty, but other hospitals are in trouble. The London Health Sciences Centre in 1999 ran an $18 million deficit. Mount Sinai and Mississauga Trillium hospitals were in an $11 million deficit and the Cardiff Valley hospital was at a $10 million deficit.
Members may say that the problem is simply that they have a greater demand than they have the money to meet it. That is possible, but other hospitals around the country do run within their means.
So long as we cannot be sure, so long as we do not have the ability to thoroughly examine the decisions made by a corporation, made by a hospital or any kind of social services institute, so long as we do not have the opportunity to examine how they are making those decisions, we cannot be sure that they are running efficiently.
Indeed on a smaller scale, in Hamilton there was a classic instance that was the joke of all the social services providers a few years ago. If you recall, Mr. Speaker, the Harris government came in and said it was going to cut 20% off the bottom line of all the social services organizations that were receiving Ontario provincial funds. An organization in my riding absorbed that 20% cut by eliminating all the service staff and just retaining the administrators and it continued to function without delivering any services.
The reality is when we talk about cuts to health care we have to remember that we cannot do cuts to health care until we create the efficiencies. The reality is if an organization, whether it is a corporation or a non-profit organization or a charity, is running really inefficiently and we compare it against an organization that is running very efficiently and we cut 20%, the efficient organization is hurt and the inefficient organization is not touched, no problem, because it can absorb the cutback in its inefficiencies.
That is the situation. We have done nothing as the federal government and we have done nothing as the provincial government to correct problem. What we need to do is we need to have a debate here not about whether we should restore funding to health care, we should have a debate about how we can make health care delivery more transparent, how we can make it more accountable, how we can make sure that those executive officers are reporting correctly to their boards of governors.
I have known, and other members in this House will have had the experience as well, instances where politicians—oh, that word politicians—have been on the boards of directors of hospitals in their communities and they have not been able to get the salaries of their chief officers. They cannot get the information. They are told, “No, you cannot have that sort of information. That is confidential”. The difficulty as the situation sits right now is that every hospital and other charitable organizations that deliver social services are only as responsible as their letters patent that were originally formulated for them, and only as responsible as their boards of directors show due diligence.
One of the sad things about social services and charities that deliver social or medical services is that too often what happens is people get on the board of directors in order to have a credential or in order to have a place in society so that when they are at cocktail parties they can show what grand contributors they are to the community because they are on the cancer society or a hospital board or whatever you will, Mr. Speaker. But too often these people do not do the due diligence and they leave it to their executive officers and those executive officers are not of the very finest quality. We the public have no guarantee that our taxpayers' money is going to be spent efficiently.
There we have it, Mr. Speaker. It is so simple. Why can we not just do something in this legislature? I have to say I have been struggling with this issue about bringing transparency and accountability to not for profit organizations for four years no, maybe five years, and so far we have not come to grips with it. So far, although I will admit I have had some, shall we say, warmth of response from cabinet, still there has not been a commitment.
What is saddest of all is the fact that the very conservative government that we see in Ontario and elsewhere in the country but let us take Ontario as the example, is always saying that we must cut taxes, we must cut spending, we must be efficient. That is not the government that is demanding transparency of the very institutions that are absolutely swallowing up money right, left and centre and not giving us a guarantee that money is being used effectively.
In my view, it is something that we as a House should certainly address. We should try to look at the problem of bringing charitable organizations to account, particularly hospitals.
We have had a tradition, through the 1970s and especially the 1980s and early 1990s, that when we have a problem in society or a problem where people are not getting the care they deserve—and it is a serious problem, I will not argue that—we seem to think that it can be answered by simply throwing more money at it. I think the government has seen only too well, particularly in the case of the money that went to the Atlantic provinces to help the situation when the cod moratorium took effect, a clear example of where it was very difficult to simply fire money at a problem and solve it. The analogy to the health care delivery systems is apt.
If we really care about Canadians who are in need and who are not getting the services from the health system that they need, then we as a parliament should be moving as quickly as possible to create legislation that brings charities and non-profit organizations under the same level of transparency that now exists for for profit corporations.
I am sure the members opposite do not realize this, but the Canada Corporations Act, under which many hospitals and other charitable organizations are incorporated, provides standards of corporate governance only for for profit organizations. It provides standards of transparency only for for profit enterprises. It specifically excludes from those requirements non-profit organizations. We have a situation in which a large hospital, which may be spending billions of dollars, literally, does not come under the same type of minimum regulations or minimum requirements for transparency and governance that is required of a for profit corporation.
I ask you, Mr. Speaker, at the very minimum, let us bring non-profit organizations and charities under the Canada Corporations Act when they incorporate so that they at least have a minimum level of transparency, accountability and standards of governance. At least let us do that. We would save billions. The federal government would not have to add to the transfers for health care, the provincial governments would save money and all Canadians would benefit.