Travel-nurse company turned my life upside down, health worker says

The company at the heart of the travel-nurse controversy is now the subject of a complaint over unpaid wages under New Brunswick's Employment Standards Act.

A nurse who moved to the province from France to work for Canadian Health Labs as a personal support worker says the company turned his life upside down when its contract with the Vitalité health authority expired in May.

Youenn Siviniant was still on the job in mid-June when Vitalité told him to stop coming to work.

His actual employer, CHL, never notified him the contract had ended, he said.

He is still officially an employee of the company but has not been paid since June 19.

The company also terminated the lease for the house in Edmundston where he's been living with his family and reneged on a promise to pay to ship his belongings back to France, Siviniant said.

"I can't understand how a company can act that way in the health sector," he said. "It's a question of values, of morals, for me.

"When you work in the health sector, you have to have ethics, you have to have values, because you're helping people, people who are sick."

Canadian Health Labs CEO Bill Hennessey did not respond to a request from CBC News for an interview about Siviniant's case. An automatic email reply said he "likely will be unresponsive" because he was travelling. 

"It further demonstrates the depth of the problem that we're facing with CHL, not just gouging the taxpayers with these exorbitant contracts but also with respect to the way it treats its own employees," said Liberal MLA and health critic Rob McKee.

"That's the problem with privatization." 

McKee said Liberal MLAs have heard of a handful of other similar cases.

The use of private travel-nurse companies by the province's health care system turned into a major political controversy in the spring after a scathing report by Auditor General Paul Martin said due diligence wasn't done on the expensive contracts. 

Vitalité's three agreements with Canadian Health Labs had cost taxpayers $98 million as of earlier this year — the bulk of the $173 million spent as of that time on travel nurse contracts.