Once again, Ontario taxpayers will be shelling out tens of millions of dollars for a cancelled contract that sees them getting nothing in return.

This time, it’s a new $26.9 million bill from scandal plagued eHealth for a cancelled contract for the development of an unfinished registry of diabetes patients.

In 2010, the Ontario government signed a contract with CGI Information Systems to create a database to track the needs of diabetes patients. The six year contract was cancelled in September 2012 at the request of eHealth.

Deb Matthews (the Health Minister at the time) and eHealth took the position that the contract could be cancelled without a cost to taxpayers, because they alleged repeated delays had made the CGI database obsolete.

However, CGI filed a lawsuit, claiming that the delays were the result of eHealth’s constant changes in the scope and design that necessitated starting the work over from scratch. CGI also claimed it had “substantially completed” the database by the summer of 2012, before the contract was cancelled, and that they had invested “significant resources” into the project.

At the time of the cancellation, Matthews characterized the contract as iron clad, and stated that her “top priority” was that taxpayers be protected. She stated that the decision to cancel the contract “protects taxpayers from $46 million in spending,” and that “no money has been paid to CGI.”

As it turns out, taxpayers weren’t protected.

At arbitration, former chief justice Warren Winkler ordered the province to pay CGI $26.9 million. That’s on top of the $24.4 million in sunk costs already paid for by the province.

In grand total, Ontario taxpayers have paid $51.3 million for a diabetes registry that they never received.

This new bill to taxpayers has received little attention. Perhaps it’s the result of an exhaustion of the public to be enraged over the repeated missteps of this government’s contracting practices.

After all, this is hardly the first time that this government’s decision to cancel a contract has cost the taxpayer tens of millions. The cancellation of the Mississauga and Oakville gas plats cost taxpayers over a billion dollars.

And of course, there is public exhaustion over eHealth itself, which was slammed by the Auditor General in 2009 for spending a billion dollars to develop electronic health records, but much of the money went towards untendered contracts and highly paid consultants. The Auditor General found that the agency had very little progress to show for the money it had spent.

Cynicism over repeated waste by this Ontario government is understandable, but it is not excusable. Ontario families are certainly not apathetic about the increasingly unaffordable cost of living in this province, which is directly linked to the wasteful spending of this government, and which is being financed by new and higher taxes.

Shining the public spotlight on waste like the newest $26.9 million cancelled eHealth contract is critical to demanding accountability with public funds. Unless taxpayers stand up and take notice, politicians will continue to waste public funds with impunity.