Six months after Premier Doug Ford’s cabinet members’ offices were told to use a system to track lobbyists’ potentially influential submissions, Ontario’s health minister’s staff had yet to add a single document to it, according to the ministry.
On Monday, Health Minister Sylvia Jones promised her ministry is now using the repository, which was created in response to the Greenbelt scandal, as intended.
“We are implementing it, and we have been,” Jones said in response to a question about her staff’s use of the repository at an unrelated news conference.
Last year, Ontario’s then-auditor general wrote in her special report on the Greenbelt removals that developers who had “direct access” to key political staffers received “preferential treatment” from the Ford government. One of her office’s 15 recommendations for the government was to develop a system for potentially policy-influencing materials received by government staff, including ministers’ political staffers, from third parties to be “centrally recorded and shared.”
Ford eventually promised to comply with all the recommendations made by the former auditor general in her Aug. 9, 2023 report.
The government created a new internal digital repository for staff a few months later. Cabinet office records previously reported on by The Trillium stated that any documents “that have been, or reasonably may be, used or considered in policy or program development or decision-making should be loaded into the central repository.”
“All ministers’ offices are required to use the repository,” a spokesperson of Ford’s wrote in an email a few months ago. “The requirement has been in place since February 7, 2024,” they added.
In response to a freedom-of-information (FOI) request for “all records staff in the (health) minister’s office input into this repository” from Jan. 1, 2024 to Aug. 14, 2024, The Trillium was told by the Ministry of Health that “no responsive records were located.”
“There were no documents uploaded to the repository within the scope of the request,” the ministry’s decision also said.
Jones, the health minister and deputy premier, said on Monday, “FOIs are a moment in time.”
“I can assure you that the ministry’s staff are compliant with the auditor general’s recommendations,” Jones added.
Jones and her office oversee what’s arguably the province’s most important ministry. The Ministry of Health leads and directs the health-care system, including Ontario’s hospitals. Each year, its expenditures account for over one-third of all provincial government spending.
Hundreds of consultant and in-house lobbyists are currently registered to lobby the health minister’s office, which is typically among the most-lobbied cabinet ministers’ offices. Same goes for her ministry.
In any given month, staffers of ministers overseeing any of the province’s major ministries will commonly receive handfuls to dozens of submissions from external stakeholders, other third parties, or their lobbyists as part of their advocacy efforts.
The most recently published annual plan by the Ministry of Health lists priorities including increasing access to primary care, improving health-care infrastructure, bolstering the system’s workforce, and improving access and reducing wait times for various health services.
The Ford government is also working on the largest expansion of private health-care providers’ involvement in the system in decades.
As cabinet office records about the lobbyist repository explained, it — at least theoretically — was supposed to provide each ministry’s highest-ranked public servants with better insight into external parties’ requests relating to key pieces of the government’s agenda. Each minister’s chief of staff were also supposed to meet weekly with their ministry’s deputy minister to discuss records recently added to the repository, according to directions in cabinet office documents from earlier this year.
—With files from Alan S. Hale
