Commission on the Reform of Ontario's Public Services

Chapter 5: Health
The stakeholders themselves must speak out. Every citizen is a stakeholder, of course, and
should pay attention to and preferably take part in any debate. But we must also hear from
health care providers of all stripes, from drug companies whose products are one of the
fastest-growing components of costs, from employers who bear much of the cost growth
through coverage of their employees’ drug and other health costs, and from academics who
study these issues.
Recommendation 5-104: Establish a <strong>Commission</strong> to guide the health reforms.
The scale of reform we propose is vast, dealing with organizational, clinical and business
issues. There is a precedent for this approach; the Health Services Restructuring <strong>Commission</strong>
was given power from 1996 to 2000 to expedite hospital restructuring in the province and to
advise the Minister of Health on revamping other aspects of Ontario’s health system. 71
Given that the scale of reform being proposed in this report extends well beyond hospitals,
a new commission should be established to guide the reforms, drawing from a broad range
of stakeholder communities, including providers and citizens/patients.
Recommendation 5-105: Do not let concerns about successor rights stop amalgamations
that make sense and are critical to successful reform.
Successor rights as currently defined do not necessarily limit the right of the government,
for legitimate reasons within its purview of responsibility, to engage in system reorganization.
Successor rights simply require that the government respect successor rights in doing so.
Inherited agreements do not live forever; provisions can be accepted initially and bargained
differently when they come up.
71 Schedule F of The Restructuring and Savings Act, S.O. 1996 Ch. 1 ("Bill 26,"), as quoted in “Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Ontario
Health Services Restructuring <strong>Commission</strong> (1996–2000), A Legacy Report,” p. iii, downloaded from
http://www.health.gov.on.ca/hsrc/HSRC.pdf.
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