Shut the Cameras Off: Liberals Vote to Hide $350M PrescribeIT Failure from Public View

The federal health committee is probing a government-funded digital prescription system that cost up to $350 million and failed to deliver results. So what did Liberal MPs do? They voted to turn the cameras off. Again.

The Pattern Is the Problem

On Tuesday, April 29, 2026, the federal Standing Committee on Health (HESA) did something that has become a Liberal reflex: it voted to go in camera — cutting off cameras and removing press and public from the room — while investigating one of the government's most expensive health technology failures.

The subject of that investigation is PrescribeIT, a national digital e-prescribing platform funded through Canada Health Infoway, a federal government-backed organization. PrescribeIT was meant to modernize how Canadian doctors and pharmacists share prescription data, dragging the country out of the fax machine era and into a unified digital system. The federal government invested up to $350 million in the project, according to reporting by the Western Standard.

It failed to live up to its billing.

Now a parliamentary committee is trying to find out why. And the Liberal majority on that committee has decided the public doesn't need to watch.

What Is PrescribeIT — and What Went Wrong?

PrescribeIT was launched under Canada Health Infoway, a federally funded not-for-profit corporation established by the federal government in 2001 to drive digital health adoption across Canada. The organization has received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal transfers over the years. PrescribeIT was its flagship project: a national e-prescribing network that would allow physicians to send prescriptions electronically directly to pharmacies, eliminating paper prescriptions, reducing medication errors, and cutting administrative costs.

On paper, the concept was sound. In practice, the project never achieved the national deployment or adoption rates that justified its price tag. After years of limited rollout, technical barriers, and physician resistance, the program has been described by critics as a costly underperformer relative to the investment made by Canadian taxpayers.

The Standing Committee on Health has now taken up an investigation into the project's failure — a legitimate and necessary exercise in parliamentary oversight. The federal government spent up to $350 million of public money on this program. Canadians have every right to know what went wrong, who made the decisions, and what accountability measures are being applied.

So Why Close the Doors?

That's the question Canadians should be asking today.

"In camera" proceedings are a standard part of parliamentary committee work. They exist for legitimate reasons: reviewing classified information, discussing confidential personnel matters, or protecting sources. None of those justifications obviously apply to an investigation into a failed government spending program. There are no state secrets in a botched e-prescribing rollout. There are only embarrassing decisions and inconvenient facts.

When a committee probing government waste votes to block public scrutiny of that probe, the message is clear: we don't want you to see this.

This is not a new pattern. Canadians watched Liberal MPs on the OGGO committee (Government Operations) fight transparency over the $54 million ArriveCAN scandal. They watched Liberals vote against public disclosure in committee after committee when the subject was procurement failures, outsourcing overruns, and government technology debacles. Time and again, the mechanism is the same: when accountability gets uncomfortable, close the room.

Canada's Digital Health Track Record

PrescribeIT is not an isolated failure. Canada has a documented track record of expensive, underperforming government health IT projects. Canada Health Infoway itself has received well over $2 billion in federal funding since its creation, spread across numerous digital health initiatives — electronic health records, clinical imaging sharing, and patient portals — many of which have delivered results far below their projected scope.

The federal government has continued to fund Canada Health Infoway year after year, despite repeated questions from auditors and MPs about measurable outcomes. PrescribeIT was supposed to be the program that finally proved the model. With up to $350 million invested, it was one of the largest single digital health bets the federal government has placed.

Now the committee investigating that bet has voted to make sure Canadians can't watch the reckoning.

The Real Cost of Opacity

Parliamentary transparency isn't a procedural nicety. It is the mechanism by which voters hold their government accountable. Committee hearings are recorded and published. Witnesses testify on the record. Canadians — and journalists — can watch, report, and apply pressure when the facts are bad.

When that mechanism is shut down by the very party under scrutiny, accountability dies in a closed room.

The Liberals under Carney inherited a government already mired in questions about procurement integrity, sole-source contracts, and technology spending failures. The spring fiscal update tabled this week showed a $66.9 billion deficit and $37.5 billion in new spending commitments. The operating budget is not projected to balance for years. Against that backdrop, a $350 million program failure isn't a footnote — it's exactly the kind of outcome Canadians need to understand before they trust this government with more.

Turning the cameras off doesn't make the failure disappear. It just ensures the people who paid for it don't get to watch who answers for it.