N.B. government introduces legislation to cancel travel nurse contract

Health Minister John Dornan is pictured.

The multi-million dollar travel nurse contract that has been blamed for growing the New Brunswick deficit could soon be cancelled if a new legislation is passed.

An Act Representing Travel Nurses would terminate the contract between Vitalité Health Network and Canadian Health Labs (CHL) for travel nurse services. Health Minister John Dornan called the contract “unfair to taxpayers” in a news release.

“Vitalité signed a contract with CHL in the midst of the pandemic,” Dornan said in an interview. “We were desperate. We wanted to make sure that people still survived, that we had good care in our hospitals, so it was under a period of distress.

“The contract that we signed was not a good contract for New Brunswickers, for taxpayers, and was for a very long period of time.”

Finance Minister René Legacy previously said the travel nurse contracts with Vitalité and Horizon Health were one of the contributing factors in the ballooning deficit for the 2024-2025 fiscal year, which reached nearly $400 million.

Legacy said the travel nurse contracts cost around $108 million.

Paula Doucet, president of the New Brunswick Nurses Union, applauded the government for moving to end the contract.

“I think that’s the best news I’ve heard so far today,” she said. “Although it may have filled a void that was needed – most definitely with Vitalité Health Network – there are other agencies out there with more, should I say, stringent or better contracts so I’m very pleased to see that this government has moved swiftly to end that contract with CHL.”

Interim Progressive Conservative Leader Glen Savoie said his party wants to know how the government will handle a possible court challenge to the legislation.

“If government is taking this decision, then we have to make sure that they’re doing what is required to attract new nurses to the region and make sure that those areas are covered,” he said. “That’s up to the government to do.”

“Government is able to break contracts and is able to legislate an inability to take us to task for that,” Dornan said. “This legislation includes diminishing CHL’s ability to sue us for contract breakage. It’s a rare tool and we only do it under certain circumstances and in this instance was done under the protection for New Brunswickers and taxpayers.”

The travel nurse contracts came under fire last summer when the New Brunswick auditor general Paul Martin released a report calling them risky and shocking. The audit found it cost Vitalité more than $300 an hour for each in-person staff worker provided by a private travel nurse agency.

The report also said the province spent $173 million on travel nurse contracts between January 2022 and February 2024.

“We first started seeing travel nurse agency in New Brunswick in February of 2022,” Doucet said. “Prior to that we’ve never utilized them. Partly due to COVID, partly due to a huge nursing shortage that is across the board, not only here in New Brunswick but Canada and worldwide.”

Last December and January, the Liberal government issued $10,000 bonuses to 9,950 nurses across the province.

-With files from Alana Pickrell

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