More than $7.6M spent on Manitoba surgical and diagnostic task force salaries in less than 2 years

Manitoba's surgical and diagnostic task force spent more than $7.6 million on salaries before the NDP government shut it down in the fall, data from the province says.

Those figures are only up to the end of March — the first quarter of the fiscal year. The task force continued to function until the end of October.

"What is becoming increasingly clear, and the salaries are a good example of that, is that the diagnostic and surgical recovery task force really had a lot  — a tremendous amount — of power and not a whole lot of accountability," Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said at news conference on Friday.

"[They were] making salary decisions and expenditure decisions and not really having to be accountable to governments or the entities that you would typically think they would and should be."

The task force — a team of health-care professionals and other experts — was created in December 2021, under the previous Progressive Conservative government. 

It was tasked with cutting the backlog of tens of thousands of surgeries, tests and diagnostic procedures made worse during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As of March 2023, the province had committed $240 million to support initiatives implemented through the task force, the government's website says.

While some wait lists were eliminated, the task force was criticized for sending many patients out of province for care. The NDP, when it was in Opposition, regularly accused the task force of prioritizing private health care over the public system.

Some of those visits to private clinics cost up to seven times more than if the procedure had been done in Manitoba, Asagwara has previously said.

Just three weeks after his party was elected in early October, now Premier Wab Kinew hit the pause button on the task force's work in order to evaluate its role and expenditures. About three weeks after that, Asagwara announced the task force was being shut down.

Provincial data given to CBC News by the health minister's office says the task force had 66 full-time equivalent positions, and spent $7,614,065 on salaries.

The breakdown of salary expenditures by year is:

• $799,622 in 2021-22.
• $5,177,373 in 2022-23.
• $1,637,070 so far in 2023-24.

More than a dozen salaries were over $200,000, including:

• $566,990 for the head of information technology.
• $321,523 for executive director David Matear.
• More than $230,000 for project managers.
• More than $200,000 for executive assistants.

The task force also employed staff who worked in other provinces, with salaries totalling $722,028 in 2022-23 and $225,000 up to the end of March this year.

Asagwara and Kinew addressed reporters Friday following a meeting — or what they called a listening tour — with health-care workers at Grace Hospital in Winnipeg. 

Asagwara commended the task force for some of its work, saying it "certainly came up with some innovative approaches that we are looking to embed into our health-care system."

However, the task force's decision-making was criticized by Asagwara and Kinew as being too autonomous and negatively impacting the health-system overall.

"[It] was very often separate from the system as a whole and as a result, created some unnecessary disruptions across the system," Asagwara said.

"The salaries are just one example of the ways in which the task force were operating in a silo that wasn't really necessarily benefiting the system more broadly."

Decisions in one region would cause repercussions in another, they said, but did not give any examples.

In discussions with health leaders and others on the front lines, "the point that was made that resources were being drawn, staff was being taken away, from a lot of departments," Kinew said, adding that wasn't limited to surgeries.

"The task force was playing favourites in the health-care system and multiple departments at the Grace Hospital were the ones that were losing staff, and now we have to repair that."

But a Winnipeg woman who got out of province surgery says she might still be waiting without the diagnostic and surgical task force.

Kim Kurylo, who had a hip replacement in Cleveland, Ohio, in November 2022, was the first patient helped by the now-disbanded task force. 

"This was an unbelievable experience," said Kurylo. "The whole task force and the surgery the whole experience was like a well-oiled machine." 

And Kathleen Cook, the Opposition PC health critic, defended the work of the task force.

In an emailed statement, she said more than 85,000 Manitobans received surgery or diagnostic procedures they were waiting for thanks to the task force, which also worked to increase capacity for joint surgery at Grace Hospital, Boundary Trails Health Centre and Brandon Hospital.

The group was also involved in implementing a new operating room at Concordia Hospital to add 1,000 in-patient and same-day hip and knee replacement procedures per year, and adding 70 new operating-room assistants to support surgical care teams, Cook said.

The task force "was always intended as a temporary measure," she said, but has been cut by the NDP "with absolutely nothing in place to improve capacity or health-care staffing in Manitoba for patients that are waiting for care right now."

When reached by CBC, the task force's former executive director, David Matear, said he can't comment right now for legal reasons but may have more to say soon.  

More than $7.6M spent on Manitoba surgical and diagnostic task force salaries in less than 2 years

12 months ago

Duration 2:32

Manitoba's surgical and diagnostic task force spent more than $7.6 million on salaries before the NDP government shut it down in the fall, data from the province says.