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Angry at the fledgling local contractor who constantly under-delivered on the stalled electricity project — yet overstated its costs when extorting more money from taxpayers.

Angry at the U.S. hedge fund that overcharged with an astonishing 14 per cent interest rate — then aggressively litigated when it had taxpayers trapped.

Only the auditor general’s office has clean hands and a clear head on this muddled story. Everyone else has their fingerprints on what reads like a case study in human decision-making gone awry.

The Globe and Mail Tue Sep 20 2016

The government of Quebec is taking the eminently sensible - and legally mandated - step of abolishing extra-billing for publicly insured medical services. Good news! But there's a problem: the changes won't take effect until early next year, and nobody really knows how much in extraneous fees is being charged in the province. How is that possible? Overbilling has been a hot-button issue for the better part of four decades. Depending on whom you talk to, Quebec's doctors are charging patients $50-million to $90-million a year in added fees.

Earlier this year, the provincial auditor-general said the Quebec government's own estimates ($83-million) don't seem to be based in verifiable fact. One Montreal-based lawyer is suing the province over extra fees. He says Quebec is Canada's worst offender; he may be right, but who really knows? The Canada Health Act forbids extra-billing, but successive federal governments have mostly treated it with impunity. At least Dr. Gaetan Barrette opted to ban fees outright rather than apply his initial prescription - to pay practitioners an equivalent additional amount out of provincial coffers. Two years ago, he leaped into politics, and has brought about a series of deep reforms. (His many critics think he's a bully and a demagogue.) Probably his hand has been forced by ongoing litigation and federal Health Minister Jane Philpott.

Vancouver Sun Thu Apr 28 2016

Déjà vu it is as private surgery centre owner Dr. Brian Day is right back where he was a year ago, once again vying to be president of Doctors of B.C. Day won the election to become the 2016-17 president, but only by one vote. A recount requested by the runner-up, Dr. Alan Ruddiman, went in Ruddiman's favour and he will take the helm of the doctors' lobby group for one year starting in June.

Day is running to become the president-elect for the 2017-18 term. He's running against one other candidate, Dr. Trina Larsen Soles, a family doctor in the Kootenay town of Golden. She's vicechair of the Doctors of B.C. board of directors while Day has formerly been president of the Canadian Medical Association. Like Day, Larsen Soles has also run once before for the Doctors of B.C. presidency. She lost to current president Dr. Charles Webb.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little.

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone.

It’s easy to find fault with both doctors and patients in such stories, but in many ways all the parties are simply victims of a larger system that encourages excessive treatment. In some unfortunate cases, doctors use the fee-for-service model to do everything they can, no matter how pointless, to make money. More commonly, though, doctors are fearful of litigation and do whatever they’re asked, with little feedback, to avoid getting in trouble.

December 18, 2013

CALGARY – A Calgary man has filed a civil lawsuit against Shoppers Drug Mart Inc., claiming his teenage daughter was not adequately warned about the risks of taking a prescribed acne medication. The statement of claim filed by Bruce McKenzie says his 18-year-old daughter, Marit, died after taking a drug called Diane-35. The statement says she suffered four cardiac arrests, a pulmonary embolism and a brain hemorrhage.

Canada Newswire Mon Sep 29 2014

TORONTO, Sept. 29, 2014 /CNW/ - As Ontario's new Health Minister Dr. Eric Hoskins sits down with provincial and territorial Health Ministers for their fall meeting this week, experts and patient advocates hope that he'll carry a strong message. Across Canada advocates are calling on the B.C. Health Minister to hang tough on the Medicare court challenge which threatens open season on patient user fees for surgeries, diagnostics and other procedures. The case was scheduled to begin on September 8, but lawyers for both Brian Day, owner of one of the largest private clinics in Canada, and the B.C. government asked the court for a delay in order to negotiate a settlement. Negotiations are now happening behind closed doors and the court date is delayed until March 2015.

Following a provincial audit in 2012 which revealed that Day was charging hundreds of thousands of dollars in unlawful user fees to patients, Day filed a Charter Challenge to nullify the laws that he was violating. His case aims to bring down the laws that protect single-tier Medicare and forbid clinics like his from extra-billing patients and charging user fees for care that currently must be provided without charge under the public health care system. The litigation has far-reaching implications for the entire country. Day's clinics were first exposed by patients who complained they were unlawfully billed for medical procedures. The B.C. government responded by trying to audit the clinics. Day refused to let in auditors until forced by a court order, and even then the clinics did not fully comply with auditors. Auditors had access to only a portion of the clinics' billings and only one month's worth of data. Nevertheless, what they found was astonishing. In a period of about 30 days, patients were subject to almost half a million dollars in user charges. The five patients who brought the initial legal petition have had their trial delayed while Day's Charter Challenge to the laws upholding single-tier Medicare is heard. They are still waiting for redress.

Montreal Gazette Tue Apr 21 2015

With less than a week before the grand opening of the MUHC superhospital, electricians are working round-the-clock to re-wire parts of the intensive-care unit to make sure that all the medical equipment can be turned on without short-circuiting. During "stress tests" that were conducted in the new ICU, staff discovered the electrical problems when "powering on" the equipment."The re-wiring in the ICU is almost complete," Ian Popple, a spokesperson for the McGill University Health Centre, told the Montreal Gazette on Monday. "It's fair to say that everyone is working round-the-clock to make sure that the hospital is ready to receive patients safely on April 26," Popple said.

The MUHC had identified a total of 3,000 "deficiencies" at the $1.3-billion superhospital. Many of the deficiencies were considered relatively minor and have been fixed. Those included replacing some locks on doors and adjusting the height of certain counters. But other flaws have been far more serious and considered "not in conformity" - meaning that they were likely the fault of the design-build contractor, SNC-Lavalin. Chief among the deficiencies were the installation of the wrong wiring in the operating rooms (the wiring was of the incorrect amperage) as well as problems with the OR ventilation system. Given that the ORs must be able to function as of 5 a.m. on Sunday, April 26, the MUHC devoted considerable resources to ensure they would be ready on that date. The OR wiring was fixed on April 11, and the ventilation was adjusted soon afterward for the "correct balance," Popple said.

National Post Tue Mar 3 2015

It offends some Canadians that there is a lawsuit afoot in British Columbia seeking to establish patients' rights to seek health-care outside the provincial government system. These critics say that the constitutional challenge - which is being waged by a private surgery clinic and four individuals who suffered real harm while sitting on health-care waiting lists - is an attack on universal care. The case "could set a dangerous precedent for the rest of the country, and move Canada toward a U.S.-style two-tier health-care system," claims a website set up by Canadian Doctors for Medicare and the B.C. Health Coalition.

As the executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, which is supporting the plaintiffs' challenge, I endorse the ideal of ensuring that quality health care is readily available to every Canadian. But the belief that a two-tier system undermines that ideal is wrong. It's as wrong as the assumption that "two-tier" equals "U.S.-style" (most of the rest of the world operates with mixed public and private health-care systems). And it's as wrong as pretending that we have a "onetier" system as it is. A couple of recent happenings, both as frustrating as they are telling, serve to underline the point rather nicely. On Monday, CBC News British Columbia published a story called "Patients' 'lives ruined' as hip surgery waits grow." The piece focuses on two B.C. osteoarthritis sufferers who are experiencing intolerable pain while they wait for the hip operations they need.

Toronto Star Thu Feb 19 2015

In a potentially precedent-setting decision, the Ontario Court of Appeal granted patients the right to sue hospitals over privacy breaches Wednesday. The unanimous ruling said provincial health privacy laws are not a roadblock to patients who want to seek justice in the courts when hospital workers snoop into their medical records. The decision comes on the heel of a Star investigation into health-related privacy violations and oversights in Ontario's health privacy legislation.

"This case is a vindication for all of those victims the Star has been writing about," said Michael Crystal, lawyer for the patients. Wednesday's ruling could have sweeping implications for the province's 155 hospitals as it has given the green light to a multimillion-dollar privacy class action launched against Peterborough Regional Health Centre. The Peterborough hospital would not answer questions from the Star about whether it intends to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court of Canada, where it would have its last chance to get the case tossed out. A massive privacy breach at the hospital between 2011 and 2012 saw hundreds of patient medical records snooped into and seven staff members fired. The breach included a domestic violence victim who was in hiding and 414 abortion files that were inappropriately accessed by a high- profile anti-abortion campaigner. A group of affected patients launched a $5.6-million privacy class action against the hospital, which in turn fought to have the case thrown out in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, arguing the courts had no jurisdiction over health-related privacy breaches.

The Province Tue Apr 14 2015

B.C. residents frustrated by waiting lists for medical services will be disappointed to learn of a bureaucratic delay in a court case that could help unstop the backlog. The case - which involves Dr. Brian Day, the Cambie Surgery Centre and four patients who suffered adverse effects when their health care was delayed - has been moseying its way through the court system for more than five years. It was scheduled to go to trial in September 2014, but was then postponed until March 2. Then, just two weeks before trial, the government's lawyers disclosed that the Ministry of Health had "recently identified a very large number of documents that may potentially be relevant" to the case.

Relevant documents are supposed to be disclosed at the very beginning of a lawsuit, not two weeks before trial. So the trial has had to be postponed until at least November while both sides' lawyers examine as many as 300,000 pages of additional documents. Poring over this mess will not be fun. This is especially bad news for the plaintiffs. One is a cancer patient who might not survive until she gets her day in court. Cynics might conclude the government arranged this stunt in the hopes of exhausting the plaintiffs' funds available to pay legal fees. But the more likely explanation is that this is simply bureaucracy in action - or, rather, bureaucracy in its characteristic inaction.