Just to be perfectly clear, Alberta Chief Medical Officer of Health Deena Hinshaw’s $227,911 in “cash benefits” is not overtime and should not be called overtime.
Call it a cash bonus if you like, although someone in the United Conservative Party Government must have reckoned that terminology would have opened the door to the argument that, compared to other top Canadian public health officials, Dr. Hinshaw doesn’t seem to have done a stellar job during the pandemic. Readers will recall the times when Alberta led the nation in COVID-19 infections and deaths.
The overtime characterization may have begun when Steve Buick, press secretary to Health Minister Jason Copping, told a reporter that Dr. Hinshaw’s huge bonus, the equivalent of 63 per cent of her base salary, was calculated on her base hourly rate of pay and the number of hours she worked beyond 45 each week.
This has not been particularly helpful to the government’s case because, as many annoyed health care workers quickly noted, at the same time as then finance minister Travis Toews was planning to give Dr. Hinshaw a huge raise, he was telling the public that nurses and other health care workers deserved a pay cut.
Mr. Toews is now a candidate to replace Jason Kenney as premier and UCP leader.
With wards too busy for them to take breaks, rampant understaffing and a doctor shortage sending thousands of Albertans to Emergency Rooms for primary care, Alberta’s nurses work untold hours of unpaid overtime every year.
If Dr. Hinshaw deserved a rich bonus for her overtime work, strain and risk during the pandemic, then surely so too do the nurses and other health care workers on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19 an its continuing aftermath.
It’s very hard to argue with that logic, although back in the first months of the pandemic, that’s exactly what the UCP was arguing.
So it’s surprising that in the ensuing brouhaha after the revelation of Dr. Hinshaw’s huge bonus on Heritage Day so many Albertans seem to have bought the government’s misleading claim that this is just overtime, and therefore acceptable.
Sorry, but no. Practically speaking and in law, supervisors, managers, and employees who deal with confidential matters do not qualify for overtime. That’s why they’re paid the big bucks.
This is true in most Western jurisdictions. The distinction is made in law in Alberta.
Dr. Hinshaw is a senior government official, in some ways like a deputy minister, although with extraordinary additional powers to enforce public health regulations – powers that she seems to have deemed appropriate to relinquish to the politicians in the provincial cabinet. We can only speculate as to why.
Be that as it may, on those grounds she would not normally qualify for overtime pay.
The regulations of the Alberta Employment Standards Code state that records of hours of work and overtime hours need not be kept for “an employee who is employed in (i) a supervisory capacity, (ii) a managerial capacity, or (iii) a capacity concerning matters of a confidential nature and whose duties do not, in other than an incidental way, consist of work similar to that performed by other employees who are not so employed.”
Dr. Hinshaw meets the definition of all points on this list.
Likewise, it is vanishingly rare for senior employees who work under contract to be paid overtime above and beyond the terms of their contract.
Dr. Hinshaw’s contract specifies her generous base salary of $363,634 ($13,985.92 every two weeks) and various other benefits.
If the government has a record of the hours she worked, it must be because she kept it.
If calling Dr. Hinshaw’s bonus something it isn’t was intended to blunt the criticism of the payment, it seems to have had the opposite effect.
Elections Alberta says NDP raised nearly triple the Q3 donations of UCP
Elections Alberta released its fund-raising disclosures for the third quarter of 2022 yesterday and the NDP appears to have raised close to triple the amount donated to the UCP.
NDP coffers grew by $1,430,146.06 in the second quarter, compared to $521,175.21 for the United Conservative Party.
Of course, certain caveats apply to these figures.
The No. 3 fund-raising “party,” once again, was the Pro-Life Alberta Political Alliance, which posted donations of $94,214.98. Arguably, the Pro-Life Party operates as a public anti-abortion and covert candidate-recruitment auxiliary to the UCP, so its donations should be considered partisan contributions to the Conservative party.
In addition, the impact of leadership contenders soliciting donations from UCP supporters will likely have reduced the amount of money flowing directly from donors to the party. But that money too should be considered donations to the UCP and, once the leadership question is settled, some of it will flow back to party coffers.
Finally, as my blogging colleague Dave Cournoyer pointed out yesterday, changes to fund-raising legislation for which the UCP has no one blame but itself mean that funds raised by its constituency associations are not counted till the end of the year.
NDP disclosures, by contrast, show the full amount raised by the Opposition party because that’s the way the NDP keeps its books.
The UCP may have thought ensuring its legislation allowed it to keep its constituency fund-raising secret until the end of the year conveyed some kind of competitive advantage, and perhaps it does, but the effect when it comes to media coverage is to establish the narrative that voters and their money are moving to the NDP because the UCP has been such a disaster.
Just the same, UCP donations must be assumed to be significantly larger than they appear.
Months ago, I sagely predicted that Dr. Hinshaw, in the middle of the UCP government’s wildly nonsensical and bizarre pandemic response, would be taking early retirement. I now have no doubt that this is the conclusion that is in the works.
Accepting this lavish cash-bonus, Hinshaw is now at the shores of the Rubicon. Very soon, she will make the fateful step that will bring her public career to an end, with little fanfare, plenty of controversy, in additional to a monumentally embarrassing pay-out.
Kenney has decided to take his leave (much to his own relief) and has decided to clean up all loose ends before his departure. I’m sure that, since he believes that the transactional universe is the only universe, Kenney provided Hinshaw with the conditions for her approval of his politically motivated Greatest Summer Ever, a handsome pay-out and early retirement with full pension, with an NDA provided, of course. It’s a great deal if you can get it, and Kenney is more than willing to provide it.
Now that his account with Hinshaw is nearing closure, one wonders what other loose ends Kenney needs to patch up? I’m sure leading up to his heralded return to Ottawa — in his mind a conquering hero — Kenney will be dropping more bombshells on the unsuspecting and born idiotic voters of Alberta.
I don’t mind being wrong, but when I am proven to be right (and brilliantly so) my chest puffs up with pride and my ego grows twelve sizes larger. I am utterly amazing and breathtakingly so.
In the event no one has read it, there’s an interesting one-on-one interview with Jason Kenney about his tenure as Alberta’s premier. Of course, Kenney is filled with all kinds of puffery, excuses, and distractions for every controversy. Pay attention to the portion of the interview, where Kenney’s pensive behaviour is described, his nervous posture, including his tense hands and frequently form tight fists. It’s as if he’s running from a crime scene.
https://edifyedmonton.com/people/profiles/i-wanted-to-have-a-normal-life/
Well yes she was on salary, but doing political clean up for Kenney and the UCP was probably more than a full time job.
In any event, it would be interesting to know how the idea of paying Hinshaw the huge extra amounts came about. However, I suspect both the UCP and Hinshaws explanations would be very self serving in the likely absence of independent documentation, so we may never really know this.
It is probably more likely that Kenney and the UCP was concerned at some point that Hinshaw was getting tired taking the fall for them and came up with the idea of giving her gobs of cash to try keep her on board. If so, it may have been way after the fact the supposed extra hours were worked and so the documentation of them may be sketchy.
Of course, the extra hours argument sounds better politically than calling it a bonus. On the same note, calling it a bonus sounds better than calling it a payment in exchange for her diminished credibility, which is another interpretation.
Regardless of the short term success of the UCP spin, I suspect most Albertans feel there there is something fishy here. Particularly given that Hinshaw is one of the few in the health care system getting large additional payments and this was not how other similar officials in other provinces were compensated. It is interesting that there doesn’t seem to be any additional explanation coming from Mr. Toews so far. He may be able to hide from this for a while, but given he is running for the party leadership, someone is likely going to eventually ask him questions he probably doesn’t want to answer. If not the media, it may be one of his competitors.
Yes, the UCP seems as successful, if not more so, in hiding their own fundraising as the excess payments to Hinshaw. Whatever the real amount raised is, it sure can be said the one thing the UCP excels at best is not being transparent.
There is something very fishy about Dr. Deena Hinshaw getting this bonus. It isn’t overtime pay at all, no matter how you look at it. It’s some type of hush money by the UCP, because they have turned her into a puppet on a string. She does every command of the UCP, and won’t dare criticize them. Remember the Sky Palace incident, involving the head honcho of the UCP, and his MLAs? Dr. Deena Hinshaw never expressed condemnation for this, even though she was aware of how wrong it was. Contrast this with Dr. Verna Yiu, and look at what the UCP did to her. We know cases of Covid-19 in Alberta are on the uptick again. Also, we know that with Covid-19 in Alberta, this province has often led the entire nation in caseloads and deaths, on a per capita case rate. The UCP made that happen by not addressing Covid-19 in a more serious manner. If the NDP are once again outperforming the UCP in donations to their party, not from any union, or corporate donations, which were outlawed by the NDP, this is another indication that the UCP brand is failing. Albertans have reached their breaking point with the UCP, and they want them gone. Hopefully, Albertans come to their senses and accomplish this at the ballot box in 2023. Retaining the UCP for even another four more years would be utter folly.
Federal fundraising numbers for Q2 came out yesterday as well. The Alberta NDP raised $200K more in just this province than the federal NDP did in the entire country during the second quarter. And, unlike the UCP, holding a leadership race did not hurt fundraising efforts of the federal Conservatives who raised more money than the federal Liberals and NDP combined.
I’m calling it hush money.
Dr. Hinshaw is in a position where she should resign. Who’s going to listen to her now, whatever she has to say? Blah, blah, blah, syphilis, blah, blah, blah, thoughts and prayers. If we wanted a hand puppet, Sesame Street has a multitude of better options with better inflection.
This is exactly what one should expect in a kleptocracy. This is exactly what has been going on with the Albaturda gov’t since early in the Klein years.
The gov’t leadership and the senior managers, DM’s & ADM’s have all, to a person, been corrupt, incompetent and avaricious; it’s as if it’s a listed requirement for the job.
These are the kind of people your friends and neighbours have been voting for an supporting for the last 30 years. Is it any wonder that this province is on the edge of anarchy and ruin?
50? 100? 500? 1000? 227911?
Ok
So the question isn’t what kind of a girl she was then
They were only negotiating price
Oh the blue Kool-Aid
And hey
Those dead guys?
They were old anyway
Executive bonuses in government would need to be either approved or recommended for approval by the immediate superior of the executive. That’s the only way it can work. As you say, CMOH is the equivalent of a deputy minister. Deputy ministers report to ministers. Presumably the CMOH reports to the Minister of Health. It’s unclear to me whether Dr. Hinshaw’s bonus was for calendar year 2021 or fiscal year 2020-2021 (ending March 31, 2021), so either Shandro or Copping made the recommendation or gave the approval. For cabinet not to have been involved is highly unlikely. Toews’s denials lack credibility.
Off-topic, but remember when the CPC tried to act like adults? https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/3-out-of-5-candidates-to-take-part-in-final-conservative-leadership-debate-tonight/ar-AA10h20R?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=162f3e669a974f5aa20e0c1061563967
2 of their candidates, including the presumed front-runner, can’t be bothered to show up for a debate scheduled by the party. Not a great look for them individually, or the party as a whole, or Canadian democracy for that matter. I am unimpressed.
Didn’t notice any other provinces handing out that type of cash to their medical officers. Dr. Bonnie Henry, B.C. did a great job and worked very hard and there wasn’t a cash gift for her. Well they did create a shoe in her honour.
Perhaps we will see more of this type of activity in Alberta so people keep their mouths shut when they leave. pay them off now so it doesn’t look so suspicious later. Of course it looks wierd now but obviously the UPC hasn’t figured that out yet.