Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty is calling on the province’s doctors to accept a two-year pay freeze when their contract expires next March, even though nurses and other health-care workers who bargain collectively have won wage increases.
Ontario’s approximately 24,000 doctors are among the last public sector workers to have a contract expire since the McGuinty government made wage restraints the centrepiece of its 2010 budget. But arbitrators have all but ignored Mr. McGuinty’s calls for a voluntary, two-year wage freeze for public-sector workers who bargain collectively.
In the absence of legislation compelling the freeze, they have awarded annual wage increases ranging from 1.5 per cent to 2.75 per cent for employees of universities, hospitals and long-term care homes, according to a survey done earlier this year by The Globe and Mail.
Mr. McGuinty said he is confident doctors will agree to a freeze, even though nurses and other health-care workers have ignored it.
“I am convinced that they understand where we find ourselves at this point in time,” Mr. McGuinty told The Globe and Mail editorial board on Thursday. The doctors’ current agreement, he said, provides “fairly significant” fee increases and is “a little bit out of whack with where we are.”
Under a collective agreement with the province that expires in March of 2012, doctors received a 12.25 per cent fee increase over four years. Talks with doctors have not always gone smoothly. Former health minister George Smitherman earned the moniker “furious George” during a round of earlier fractious negotiations in 2005.
Stewart Kennedy, president of the Ontario Medical Association, which negotiates on behalf of doctors, said the most recent contract put a significant focus on getting 500,000 patients who didn't have a doctor the care they need. An additional 1.3 million Ontarians now have a doctor.
“We look forward to our negotiations with government and are confident that we can find mutually beneficial solutions for the current challenges in the health care system,” Dr. Kennedy said in a statement.
New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath said she cannot trust much of what Mr. McGuinty says when he talks about pay freezes.
“We know what Mr. McGuinty’s zeroes and zeroes look like,” she said in a separate visit at The Globe’s editorial board on Thursday. “Zero for some and not so zero for others.”
Since the 2010 budget, public sector settlements have averaged 1.5 per cent a year over the life of the agreement, according to the Ministry of Labour. This is slightly less than an average of 1.9 per cent in the private sector.
Mr. McGuinty, who is seeking a third term in next Thursday’s provincial election, is trying to rein in public sector wages in a bid to erase the province’s multibillion dollar deficit by fiscal 2017-18. He told the editorial board he can still meet that target, despite the weakening global economy. He is also sticking to his growth forecasts of 3 per cent for the province.
His government did manage to rein in health-care spending, which accounts for the largest chunk of program spending, to a growth rate of 3 per cent last year.
Hospitals represent the largest share of health-care spending in Ontario, followed by doctors’ compensation and prescription drugs. The province’s doctors collected $8.76-billion in compensation in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2009, according to government figures.
