Premier Mike Harris brushed aside warnings in 1997 that the elimination of provincial funding for regional public-health boards would be dangerous, Ontario's former chief medical officer of health said yesterday.
"The Premier looked at me, and I was quite certain he was hearing what I was saying," Dr. Richard Schabas told the judicial inquiry into last year's tainted-water tragedy in Walkerton. "We weren't more than a few feet apart and then he basically turned away from me, and as far as I was concerned the Premier was turning his back on public health."
The incident took place in late May of 1997 at a meeting of the powerful policy and priorities committee of cabinet, which is chaired by Mr. Harris and sets the government's overall direction. Dr. Schabas had been sent by Jim Wilson, who was then health minister, to try to make sure the committee would decide to continue to provide almost full funding for health boards.
Instead, the government shifted all the cost of public-health boards to municipalities starting in 1998, a course Dr. Schabas worried would make medical officers of health vulnerable to bullying from small-town politicians.
A few months after this meeting with the Premier, Dr. Schabas took a leave from his job. The next year he resigned, partly in protest over what he considered the Conservative government's disdain for public servants and public institutions. He is currently an executive at a drug company. Dr. Schabas described his observations about the Harris government in frank terms to chief commission counsel Paul Cavalluzzo. Although Dr. Schabas said he enjoyed his work, did it for 10 years and would have liked to have continued indefinitely, he felt he couldn't deal any longer with the narrow-mindedness and nastiness of people heading the Conservative government.
"This was a government that I think really, really held public institutions in contempt and I think was contemptuous of the people who worked in public institutions," Dr. Schabas said.
"I just didn't feel that I could continue to operate effectively in that kind of environment."
The government has since incorporated some of his concerns in its funding for health boards, and now splits the costs half and half with municipalities.
In his testimony, Dr. Schabas also described what he called the "extraordinary step" of Mr. Wilson writing to Norm Sterling, his counterpart at the Ministry of the Environment. In his letter, Mr. Wilson asked for an amendment to the Ontario Water Resources Act that would require waterworks to immediately notify local medical officers of health of test results showing contamination in water supplies.
Mandatory reporting, of the kind recommended by Dr. Schabas, might have prevented the tragedy in Walkerton.
Dr. Schabas's testimony was the start of a major week at the inquiry, which is investigating why seven people from this western Ontario farming community died last year and thousands were sickened from E. coli contamination of their water supply.
Mr. Harris is scheduled to testify this Friday, after Brenda Elliott and Mr. Sterling, the two former environment ministers who masterminded his government's policy of cuts of nearly 50 per cent in environmental-protection budgets.
Dr. Schabas, in his testimony, described in detail the cabinet committee meeting where Mr. Harris spurned his advice.
After Dr. Schabas sat down, an assistant deputy minister "came over and put his hand on my shoulder and said 'Dr. Schabas, the Premier doesn't want you here for this discussion.'
"I was taken aback and started to express my concerns to him and then I looked and I realized that the Premier himself was sitting directly across the table from me," Dr. Schabas related.
"So I turned and I addressed my remarks to the Premier and basically said that the Minister of Health had specifically asked that I be here, that these are important issues with regard to public health . . . and that in my view it was very important that the viewpoint of public health be heard in these discussions."
That is when Dr. Schabas said the Premier looked at him, then turned his back.
In his testimony, Dr. Schabas also elaborated on concerns he held over the government's decision in 1996 to privatize the routine testing of municipal water supplies. Both the ministries of Health and Environment had laboratories that offered this service.
The government abruptly ended the service with about two months notice.
But Dr. Schabas said government operation of the labs had functioned well, in part because of the ease with which government officials could get information on disease outbreaks.
The province also chose to privatize the laboratory testing of drinking water without introducing a mandatory requirement that medical officers of health be notified of test results showing contaminants. The province had voluntary reporting of adverse test results, and Dr. Schabas said this situation was "not adequate."
He was so worried about this deficiency that he encouraged Mr. Wilson to warn Mr. Sterling at the Environment Ministry that water legislation needed revamping to include a mandatory reporting rule. Mr. Wilson did so in the letter sent on Aug. 20, 1997.
Although Mr. Wilson wrote his letter in August, Mr. Sterling didn't respond until Nov. 10 that year. By then, Elizabeth Witmer had been named Health Minister.
Dr. Schabas said that it is extremely unusual for one minister to write another warning that legislation contains loopholes that could threaten public health.
"In my 10 years as chief medical officer of health, I cannot recall another similar letter of this kind," he said.
In his response, Mr. Sterling dismissed the concerns.
In August of 2000, after the deaths in Walkerton, the Environment Ministry introduced mandatory reporting rules, as Dr. Schabas had called for almost three years earlier.