16 FEBRUARY 2012

At every level of the vast Ontario provincial and municipal bureaucracy,corruption, nepotism and mediocracy reigns supreme. The severe lack of proper education of the topmost bureaucrats and politicians invokes their personal instinct for greed, and their lack of sense of purpose evokes their intutive powers to autocratically devise public policy mandates privately behind closed doors in a democratic Ontario.

These public policies devised by the arrogant and the ignorant using pure personal instincts and personal intuition run contrary to common sense in general and against human reasoning in particular. A culture of secretocracy and opaqueocracy has been developed in which millions of dollars worth of government contracts are being fabricated and handed out by high profile bureaucrats to individuals and firms without tendering, with no procedure and with no appropriate documentation and paperwork.

The lack of accountability and transparency ensures that the delivery of the services is never questioned due to the absence of paperwork, thereby, allowing millions of dollars of contract money to be evaporated into thin air. The two recent healthcare scandals, the e-health and the consultant-use scandal, are a case in point in which the Ontario hospitals and LHIN’s CEO’s, Lobbyists and Consultants splitted and distributed healthcare government contract funds amongst themselves without any accountability whatsoever, leading to a staggering loss of healthcare revenue.

Considering the weakness and the impotence of the mainsteam media, no higher authority or a watchdog in Ontario, legal or non-legal, has yet dared to raise any objections or question the guilty, or even spoken out about bringing the culprits to task and holding the government to account.Even though, the Criminal Code of Canada Sec. 380 clearly states that anyone who by deceit, falsehood or other fraudulent means defrauds the public of any property, money or valuable security, is guilty of an indictable offence, yet no crime investigation apparatus or any law enforcement agency in Ontario has sought to put those involved in the two healthcare scandals on trial, in order to retrieve the lost and stolen billions of essential healthcare dollars, to be repatriated and re channeled back into the frontline healthcare where emergency rooms, hospital beds and even hospitals are being closed down.

Official government watchdogs like the police and the judiciary conveniently closed their eyes while the Ontario healthcare bureaucrats, the hospitals and LHINs CEO’s, Lobbyists and Consultants helped themselves to the public coffers. Not having brought the healthcare officials and executives involved in these scams to justice clearly proves that they remain above the law.

In this way, the top provincial and municipal bureaucrats skim off an enormous chunk of social, economic, healthcare, educational and infrastructural development funds by awarding and approving lucrative government contracts to favourite Consultants and Lobbyists who are a part of the closely knit extended family, relatives and friends circle. Therefore, all exclusively untendered and sole-sourced government contracts, instead of being publicly auctioned in an open and transparent manner to the lowest bidder, actually remain within the bureaucratic
“family”, in which the contract authorizing bureaucrats pocket an enormous chunk of the essential development funds as kickbacks, while another large portion of the funds is pocketed by the “family” contractors working under the guise of Consultants and Lobbyists, thereby, leaving only a tiny portion of the contract fund to be spent on the actual project itself.

The Ontario Auditor General’s two investigative health-care reports have delved into Ontario’s healthcare bureaucratic corruption, fraud, theft, abuse and waste of taxpayer dollars, and the severe lack of transparency and accountability associated with it, in great detail. These two massive healthcare scams suggest a case of high-scale profiteering by the influential healthcare powerbrokers of Ontario. Furthermore, these scams mirror the corruption situation in every government department and agency of Ontario.

The existing bureaucratic administrative functioning has evolved into a system in which the corrupt bureaucratic and political conmen, crooks and cronies are constantly and continuously being highly protected and are served with impunity, never to be brought to justice. This system has also resulted in denying equal opportunities to the general public as far as awarding of government contracts is concerned.

The present system also offers the bureaucrats a free-hand to continue unhindered with their unjust and undemocratic activities of corruption and public-fund embezzlement. Injustice, inequality and dishonesty have become the hallmarks of Ontario bureaucracy as the provincial and municipal bureaucrats keep ignoring the fact that their blind quest for political and financial dominance of the available resources ensure a greater subordination of the poor, the weak, the disadvantaged, the vulnerable, the destitute, the hungry, the homeless, the unemployed, the student, the single mother, the aboriginal, the sick, the disabled, the elderly, and the frail who form the voiceless and the silent majority population of Ontario.

The Ontario provincial and municipal bureaucrats have long paid lip-service to the ideology of democracy while immersing neck-deep into autocratic practises. Ontario’s idle senior bureaucracy is literally being paid and rewarded heavily to innovate, invent and create bureaucratic
hurdles and red tape for the common person in every field, against small-business economic activity in particular and against common sense in general. This political and bureaucratic lack of integrity has led to a dramatic increase in corruption scandals and scams in almost every
government department and agency of Ontario. Democratic public government institutions are being run as personal and private domains and inheritances, especially, the rural municipalities which are returning to an era of feudal lordships. The Val-Rita municipality fraud is a case in point, where the mayor’s family member was involved in a massive public fund embezzlement scandal.

To make matters worse, Ontario’s top muncipal, provincial and federal bureaucrats are involved in an undercover competetion with each other to gain an upper hand over public finances while deliberately failing to see eye to eye over important public issues thereby putting personal interests, allegiances and egoes before public interest in order to propogate their “lifetime-time” power careers. The frontline government employees, workers and others who dare to speak out against the bureaucratic and government excesses and unjust policies are intimidated and threatened with job loss, and are labelled and framed as insane and dangerous radicals, and are quickly and easily submissioned into silence. They are further forced and entangled into long and cumbersome false legal battles where they are left to suffer at the hands of a highly inefficient and a super-slow judicial system.

This culture of fear, persecution, retaliation and retribution promoted by the Ontario government against the whistleblowers must be brought to an end. These suppressively undemocratic practises on behalf of the government bureaucracy pose a serious threat to the deeply-rooted democratic traditions of Ontario. The Drummond Report must take a serious look at this dire situation which is eating up at the very roots of Democracy itself.