Travel nurses employed by Toronto staffing agency told not to return to work in New Brunswick

New Brunswick’s francophone health authority has cancelled all shifts for nurses from a Toronto staffing agency, winding down its relationship with a company it has blamed for causing its $100-million deficit.

Nurses deployed by Canadian Health Labs were told with less than a day’s notice at the end of January that their services would no longer be required by the Vitalité Health Network, though the health authority says the contract is still in place.

The agreement between Vitalité and CHL was supposed to expire in February, 2026. But there has been a wave of criticism from provincial politicians, including, most recently, Premier Susan Holt, who told Brunswick News she wanted to see an end to the contract, which was the subject of a damning Auditor-General’s report.

Auditor-General Paul Martin, in a June report, described CHL’s contracts as expensive and hastily signed, “resulting in risk to government.” His audit was launched after The Globe and Mail published an investigation, which found that CHL charged six times what a regular staff nurse earns.

The Globe report into the growth of nursing agencies in the public health care system focused on CHL’s contracts in New Brunswick and Newfoundland, which were signed at a time when local health authorities across Canada were dramatically increasing their reliance on such for-profit services to deal with acute staffing shortages during the pandemic.

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CHL also billed high rates for accommodations for out-of-province nurses and invoiced Vitalité for meal allowances that weren’t redistributed to CHL’s workers. In its last fiscal year, Vitalité recorded a deficit of more than $100-million, which chair Thomas Soucy has attributed to its reliance on temporary nurse staffing agencies.

In a e-mailed statement sent Monday, CHL confirmed that its nurses had been told not to show up for work. “CHL remains in full compliance with its contractual obligations and is actively seeking a solution.” The company and the health authority have been in a legal dispute over the contract for more than a year.

Ms. Holt’s office referred a request for comment to the province’s health ministry, which, in turn, said inquiries about the contract should be directed to Vitalité. The authority said in a written statement that the “contract with CHL remains in place to this day” but provided no further details.

However, two nurses confirmed to The Globe they were told their employment in New Brunswick was over. The Globe has obtained two e-mails that a Vitalité administrator sent to CHL nurses, informing them about the “end of the contractual relationship” with the Ontario company.

The Globe is not identifying the nurses because they were subject to a non-disclosure agreement with CHL.

Nurses were first notified on Jan. 30 via an e-mail from Chad Doucet, an administrator in charge of operational management of Vitalité‘s CHL contracts, according to a copy obtained by The Globe.

Mr. Doucet asked the nurses to contact him no later than the next morning to discuss “the contractual relationship between CHL and the Vitalité Health Network.” He added that he was available until 11 p.m.

In the e-mail, he reassured the recipients that this was not owing to any mistake or disciplinary issue on their part.

One nurse said Mr. Doucet told her there had been a meeting where Vitalité decided to end its dealings with CHL. She was informed she could apply for a job with two other agencies that work with the health authority, Magnus HRS and Goodwill Staffing.

In a second e-mail sent Jan. 31, Mr. Doucet said that the contractual relationship between CHL and Vitalité was over as of 11:59 p.m. that night.

The nurses were further instructed to return their badges and told not to query their supervisors because the decision didn’t come from them but from “the group in charge of the management of agency personnel.”

In an e-mail to its New Brunswick workers, CHL said it was advised by Vitalité that the contract was still in place but the deployment of nurses was stopped for about 30 days. “Our preferred path forward is to restore the previous schedule,” the e-mail states. Although the nurses’ contracts include non-compete clauses, the e-mail noted that the company would not oppose them working for other nurse staffing companies.

In his 2024 audit of the province’s use of temporary nurses, Mr. Martin had warned about a clause in the CHL contract that provided for an automatic renewal. That clause states that if the company meets a bilingual staffing requirement for 12 months the agreement automatically renews for up to five terms. “This is not good,” he told New Brunswick lawmakers in June.

Vitalité has declined to answer questions about how this will affect staffing levels at hospitals and nursing homes. But invoices obtained by The Globe show that in April of last year, there were 44 CHL nurses deployed in Vitalité facilities.

Last summer, Vitalité chief executive officer France Desrosiers testified before New Brunswick legislators that her organization was compelled to sign deals with CHL in 2022 because it was the only company that could supply bilingual nurses on short notice.

Vitalité officials testified that they had been involved in a year-long legal dispute over the costs of the contracts.

The current CHL contract with Vitalité runs from Dec. 5, 2022, to Feb. 5, 2026, and is worth a maximum of $93-million, not including travel and accommodation expenses. The contract, which charges Vitalité $306.70 an hour for a nurse, was signed at a time when RNs in New Brunswick earned under $50 an hour.

Mr. Martin is currently in court litigation with Vitalité after the authority refused to turn over to his office three internal audits of its contracts with CHL.