The Globe and Mail has received two Michener nominations for investigative work into the high prices a private nursing company charged governments in New Brunswick and Newfoundland and for exclusive reporting on a listeria outbreak that killed three people and injured many more.
The Michener Award is given annually for outstanding reporting that prompts positive change for the public good. It is widely considered the top prize in Canadian journalism. Five finalists were named Tuesday and one will be chosen as the winner at a ceremony next month.
In the spring of 2023, an Ontario opposition politician told the legislature that a whistle-blower had approached her office to say that Canadian Health Labs, or CHL, had been hiring nurses away from Ontario’s hospitals while raking in huge profits by offering their services elsewhere in Canada.
Globe and Mail health reporter Kelly Grant took notice: For months she had been hearing from her sources about the devastating practice of for-profit staffing agencies poaching nurses from the public system and subcontracting them elsewhere at high prices.
She and investigative reporter Tu Thanh Hà teamed up with news researcher Stephanie Chambers to understand the impact of this trend.
After four months of work, including information from dozens of sources, 40 freedom of information requests and a review of 4,500 pages of documents, The Globe revealed that CHL stood to gain hundreds of millions of dollars in public money by charging hourly rates of more than $300 for each nurse, twice or three times the rates of other companies, and six times what a regular nurse earned.
Their investigation found CHL had billed taxpayers in Newfoundland and New Brunswick for more than $1.6-million in meals, even though none of their nurses ever received those allowances. In addition, CHL claimed a raft of expenses associated with moving nurses, like an air fryer and pet transportation. Further revenues were extracted by charging health authorities for lodging and car rental via affiliated companies.
New Brunswick’s Vitalité Health Network went $100-million over budget, mainly because it had locked itself in long-term contracts with CHL.
The articles dominated debate in legislatures in both provinces and the auditors-general of Newfoundland and New Brunswick launched investigations. The latter has already wrapped up its probe and found the contracts “did not demonstrate value for money.”
In an investigation dubbed The Algorithm, Globe reporters Kathryn Blaze Baum and Grant Robertson spent four months proving the deaths of three people and the injuries to many more after a listeria outbreak at a Canadian food-processing facility in Pickering, Ont., were preventable.
The outbreak last summer and the tragedy that followed were treated by authorities as a terrible accident.
Public-health officials traced the strain of listeria making people sick to plant-based milks and millions were pulled off shelves in a countrywide recall. But Canadians were not told that the same strain of listeria was responsible for illnesses dating back to August, 2023. For 11 months, the problem had gone unaddressed.
The investigation by Ms. Blaze Baum and Mr. Robertson revealed new information about how food-manufacturing companies have effectively been allowed to police themselves in a system that puts the public at risk. In the wake of dogged reporting and persistent questioning from the pair, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) was forced to admit no inspector had visited the site since 2019, when an inspector was there for another matter. Further, the agency acknowledged it could not say when, or if, the plant had ever been inspected.
The two reporters learned that the CFIA had been relying on an algorithm to determine which facilities should be prioritized for inspections - a system that never flagged the Pickering factory for inspection.
Within days of The Globe’s report, the federal Health Minister ordered the Inspector-General and the CFIA to undertake a formal review of the algorithm. Joriki Inc., the plant owner, had spent five months promising to reopen the Pickering plant, saying it was safe, but the company closed the site and put the building up for sale three weeks after The Globe’s story was published.
Staff