2015 Ontario auditor generals report

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Justin Justin help me it's Wynne!

Ontario's auditor general slams Liberal government over litany of problems Hydro One outages, child-abuse checks, nursing-home inspections among problems noted

A litany of problems is laid bare in a report released today by Ontario's auditor general, from the growing frequency of Hydro One's power outages to a startling $140 million worth of mistakes in welfare payments.

Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk also raises concerns that inspections of school buses and nursing homes aren't being done on time, that Children's Aid Societies are failing to conduct basic background checks on potential child abusers, and that people are waiting too long for home care.

• Slow care for elderly, disabled cited by auditor general
• Read the entire auditor general report

Lysyk released her annual report Wednesday morning at Queen's Park.

The auditor finds the province's new computer system for welfare payments is still riddled with problems and making millions in payment errors.

Lysyk said the Social Assistance Management System (SAMS) has now made a total of $89 million in overpayments  and short-changed welfare recipients by another $51 million, far more than previously admitted by the government.

CBC News revealed a year ago that SAMS sent out some $19 million in welfare payments it shouldn't have, while sending some recipients too little money, or nothing at all.

Lysyk said the system still has 771 "serious defects" that are not yet fixed. "Until most of the serious defects are identified and fixed, SAMS will continue to generate errors." 

She criticizes the government for rushing the system into operation last fall despite knowing it had problems. The government has so far spent $290 million on SAMS, $90 million over budget.

Hydro One: less reliable but costing more

Today's auditor general's report also includes the last report the office will do on Hydro One, now that it's no longer a Crown corporation.

Lysyk found Hydro One's service is getting less reliable yet costing more. The auditor general noted the frequency of power outages are on the rise and ranks Hydro One as the worst of all of Ontario's power companies for how long those outages last.

Lysyk's report also raises concerns about the province's child-protection system.

She said Ontario's 47 Children's Aid Societies are too slow at investigating allegations of abuse. Not one of the child-protection investigations her office reviewed was done within the required 30 days. Instead, the cases took an average of more than seven months.

Lysyk also chastises the government for failing to make sure every CAS acts on the recommendations of probes into children's deaths.

She said they far too often fail to perform basic background checks on the people involved with vulnerable children. The Ontario Child Abuse Register was not checked by CAS in more than half of the abuse cases she reviewed.   

"These checks are important because they help assess the level of threat to the child's safety," Lysyk writes. She goes on to cite the 2002 death of Jeffrey Baldwin, malnourished and neglected by his grandparents, both of whom had prior records of child abuse.

"Such gaps in conducting child-protection history checks may still exist 13 years after the death of Jeffrey Baldwin," Lysyk wrote.

The government's IT system to link Children's Aid Society files together, the Child Protection Information Network, is four years behind schedule and $50 million over budget. It was supposed to be in use at all 47 CAS agencies by now; instead the auditor said it's only being used by five.   

Nursing home residents at risk

The auditor said the 78,000 people in Ontario's nursing homes may be "at risk" because crucial  inspections are behind schedule and orders to fix problems aren't being followed.

"Much more needs to be done to keep residents safe," said Lysyk. 

She said the backlog of ministry inspections of long-term care homes in response to complaints of neglect or incidents of abuse more than doubled in just 15 months. The backlog rose to 2,800 in March 2015, from 1,300 in December 2013.

When inspections are done and problems found, inspectors issue "compliance orders" to fix the problems. But Lysyk said the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care fails to check the orders have been carried out within its 30-day target about two-thirds of the time.  

Little oversight over school bus companies 

The safety of the 830,000 children who ride school buses in Ontario is another of Lysyk's concerns She criticizes the Ministry of Transportation for failing to ensure school bus safety inspections are always done on time, and for failing to ensure that all defects are fixed. The auditor's report said the government has "little oversight" of the companies that operate school buses and lets them certify their own buses for mechanical fitness. 

Lysyk also said Ontario's home-care system is riddled with problems, including ones that haven't been addressed since they were identified in a 2010 audit.

Wait times for getting personal support worker services are far too long, she wrote. People with identical home-care needs get different levels of service in different parts of the province, or in at least one region, no service at all.

Other highlights of the auditor's report:

The problem of "bed blockers" — people staying in acute-care hospitals even after they've been discharged has actually worsened since 2007, when the government created regional bureaucracies (Local Health Integration Networks) that were supposed to deal with that problem.

The government hasn't even tried to measure whether the $1.45 billion it has spent on grants and interest-free loans to businesses have actually helped boost employment or the economy.

The auditor general is calling for "significant investment" in Ontario's aging schools. More than 100,000 students are in portable classrooms, yet Lysyk found the education ministry rejects about two-thirds of the school capital funding proposals it receives each year. 

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-auditor-report-1.3347035

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The AG on hydro: scandalous under 12 years of Liberals as so many other things like eHealth, Orange, gas plants etc

AG finds Ontario hydro customers pay billions extra for Libs' energy decisions

The electricity portion of hydro bills for homes and small businesses rose 70 per cent between 2006 and 2014, which Lysyk said cost consumers $37 billion dollars in so-called Global Adjustment payments to generators – and will cost ratepayers another $133 billion by 2032.

The auditor found the Green Energy Act is also driving up rates. Hydro customers will pay a total of $9.2 billion more for wind and solar projects under the Liberals’ 20-year guaranteed-price program for renewable energy than they would have paid under the old program.

Ontario’s guaranteed prices for wind power generators are double the U.S. average, while the province’s solar power rates are three-and-a-half times higher.

The auditor said the lack of a co-ordinated planning process resulted in additional cost of $408 million to pay generators for the increased power they produced, or for not producing power at the request of the system operator.

http://www.680news.com/2015/12/02/ontario-ag-finds-hydro-consumers-pay-billions-extra-for-liberals-e...

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"Hydro customers will pay a total of $9.2 billion more for wind and solar projects under the Liberals’ 20-year guaranteed-price program for renewable energy than they would have paid under the old program."

Yes it does cost money to clean the air.

Conservatives would rather go back to the days of producing electricity using coal.  It was cheap, real cheap.  India still does it today.

Is that what we want for our children and grandchildren?

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I think everyone would agree with clean air. However you're OK with the mismanagement in doing so along with the other items mismanaged in the AG report? 

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Auditor general report confirms what’s wrong with Ontario’s Liberals: everything

There’s an episode in the 11th season of the Simpsons in which Mr. Burns goes to the Mayo Clinic for a check-up, after being named the oldest man in Springfield. There, the doctor tells him he is the sickest man in the United States. “You have everything,” he informs him.

“You mean, I have pneumonia?” Burns asks.

“Yes.”

“Juvenile diabetes?”

“Yes.”

“Hysterical pregnancy?”

“Uh, a little bit, yes.”

Though it sounds like bad news, the doctor explains that all of his diseases exist in him in “perfect balance.” As an illustration, the doctor grabs a handful of oversized “novelty” diseases and tries to cram them through a miniature door, all at the same time. But since the diseases are so numerous, and are all tangled up together, none is about to break through the opening.

“So what you’re saying is: I’m indestructible,” Mr. Burns says.

“Oh, no, no,” the doctor replies, “in fact, even a slight breeze could —”

“Indestructible,” Burns interjects, wistfully.

This scene kept playing over and over in my head as I read the litany of indictments outlined in Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk’s annual report on Wednesday. The report skewered the Liberal government over its handling of the energy file, over delays in home health care, over the enduring problems with the province’s 47 children’s aid societies and over many, many other problem-riddled departments under the purview of the Ontario government. Indeed, if I were to summarize the findings of Lysyk’s 770-page document, it seems the big issue with the Liberal government is: everything.

Unbelievable overspending? Yes. Debilitating arrogance? Yes. Toxic disorganization? Yes. “Hysterical pregnancy?” Possibly, I’ll have to check again.

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Each chapter — or, rather, each subsection of each chapter — is undoubtedly worthy of its own discussion. In Chapter 3, Lysyk outlines how the government rushed into its implementation of a new computer system for managing welfare payments, called the Social Assistance Management System (SAMS). Lysyk says that even though SAMS was not fully tested, the Ministry of Community and Social Services launched it anyway, since “it considered the risks of delaying the launch greater than the risks of launching a system that was not fully ready.” The result was that SAMS has been responsible for about $140 million in benefit calculation errors, with $89 million going to potential overpayments and $51 million to potential underpayments.

On home health care, the audit found that support and services vary depending on where clients live, on the proficiency of individual care co-ordinators and on fluctuating targets and standards of care. Though overall funding for Ontario’s 14 Community Care Access Centres has gone up by 73 per cent over the last decade, clients still face long wait times for services and, in one case, there were nine times more people waiting for services at the end of the fiscal year compared to the beginning.

The audit also showed improper oversight of school bus companies, a failure to regularly conduct background checks on individuals responsible for vulnerable children in the care of children’s aid societies and about $1.45 billion doled out in corporate welfare, much of which was not made public.

But the most damning indictment in the audit was of the Liberal’s handling of the energy file. Lysyk found that between 2006 and 2014, Ontarians paid $37 billion over the market price for electricity. Prices for residential usage has gone up 70 per cent over the same time period and the province has made a habit of ignoring expert advice in pursuing costly energy initiatives, such as converting a coal plant into a biomass facility, even after it was told it would not be cost-effective. The audit confirmed that Ontario is making too much energy and paying too much for green energy, all while Hydro One equipment stands at a “very high risk of failing.”

The breadth of mismanagement detailed in those 770 pages makes this report perhaps the most astonishing this province — certainly this government — has ever seen. To give it a meticulous read, one might think it could be the Liberal’s early swan song, but then you take a step back and realize all of those screw-ups — the crippling waste, the apathy to expert advice, the dangerous lack of oversight — are all cramming in to get through the door at the same time. As a result, nothing gets through.

In the same way that a single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic — a single scandal is an outrage, but a series of scandals is sloughed off as business as usual, at least for this government. Each mess-up is competing for airtime, so none of them gets their due. Perhaps that’s why this government seems to think itself “invincible.”

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