Health Minister Eric Hoskins says he is not planning to follow the lead of his colleagues in education and release detailed information about repair backlogs under his purview.

The Ministry of Education released detailed figures on the repair needs for every school in the province — taking the opportunity to release a statement from Minister Mitzie Hunter trumpeting its transparency in doing so.

But Hoskins won’t release any information about hospital repair backlogs, out of a concern it will inflate the costs of actually carrying out the repairs.

“Certainly, the ministry has said that if we were to disclose those estimates, it could artificially drive up the cost of repairs that we undertake to do,” Hoksins told QP Briefing this week.

But he wouldn’t say that his colleagues had made a mistake.

“You’ll have to talk to education about that — I’m following the best advice of my ministry,” he said.

Hunter’s office declined to provide any comment for this story. (UPDATE, see a statement from the minister office at the end of this post.)

Hoskins also disputed hospital-repair information released by the NDP this spring. The NDP obtained, through a Freedom of Information request, a list of deferred maintenance needs at Ontario hospitals. The names of the hospitals were redacted but the costs totalled $3.27 billion. (See the result of the NDP's information request below.)

The ministry declined to release the hospitals’ names, saying it could interfere with contract negotiations and spark concerns that “contractors currently engaged by hospitals could lose confidence in the facility’s ability or intention to pay on current contractual obligations.”

(The costs are far less than the more than $15 billion in repairs that Ontario schools need, information that was released by the Ministry of Education.)

“It’s deferred maintenance, so it doesn’t represent the cost of repairs to continue to deliver quality health care. It has no impact on continuing to deliver quality health care,” said Hoskins. “When I was in the legislature, I likened it to repairing my roof — it’s the cost of restoring a hospital to brand new status. Just like you wouldn’t repair or replace your roof every single year, you would determine that based on a whole variety of factors. I think we need to look at this in a similar fashion.”

NDP Health Critic France Gélinas said she believes the concern about driving up repair costs is only a smokescreen.

“He says — and I think he made that up — that it is because a contractor would have an unfair advantage, yet you have the exact same data available for schools,” said Gélinas. “You figure the people who bid for jobs on our schools are different than the people who bid for jobs on our hospitals? Changing a roof, changing a furnace is the same whether you do it at a hospital or a school.”

Gélinas said she doesn’t see the concern over driving up repair costs as a valid excuse.

“In every other government project, we know approximately the size of the project and it has not had a detrimental effect,” she said. “It’s a way to protect this party, not protect our health-care system.”

Ontario is spending $175 million in 2016-17 to keep hospitals in a state of good repair, and spent $125 million in each of the previous two years, plus a ten-year plan to spend $12 billion in capital grants to hospitals for infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the province is spending $2.7 billion over the next two years on school repair and renewal.

UPDATE: After publication, Patrick Searle, a spokesperson for Minister Hunter, released a statement on the release of repair backlog information, as follows:

"Our government has been working hard, through the Open Government Initiative, to be a leader in openness and transparency. However, we need to ensure we protect taxpayers at the same time. This means not negatively impacting procurement, contract negotiations, project tendering, or other aspects of asset management and capital planning. As capital planning information differs between ministries, officials must take the necessary time to review information to determine if it can be released without negatively impacting taxpayers or raising potential construction costs. Finding that balance is important. Education officials reviewed the FCI information, including information that had been released previously, and decided it would not increase costs for Ontario taxpayers. It was subsequently released in August 2016."

Hospital repair backlog info won’t be released: Minister

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