Travel nurses say Ontario agency owes them months of pay for Saskatchewan work

SHELLBROOK · A group of travel nurses working in Saskatchewan say they have not been paid in months by the Ontario staffing agency that hired them. The nurses, who filled shifts at the Parkland Integrated Health Centre in Shellbrook, say EZ Care has gone "radio silent" after warning of pay delays due to an "agency transition." Shalu, an emergency room nurse who uses only one name, said she is owed about $50,000 for work and expenses from June 14 to Aug. 4. She said she and around 25 other nurses across Canada have not been paid.

"We just would like to get paid for work," Shalu said in an interview with CBC News. "It is depressing some days. It hits me that I've worked for two months, and for nothing." She said the nurses received a letter from EZ Care around the end of July about the transition, but nothing followed and the new company named never took over. CBC News reviewed bank statements showing Shalu has not been paid. She said she is paid $86 per hour, with overtime, plus a $40 per diem and $75 per day for travel expenses.

Esther Naigaga, another travel nurse at the Shellbrook hospital, said she is missing about $20,000 for a month of work. She said she is paid $85 per hour plus overtime and the same expense allowances. "It's a long 12-hour shift with lots of hard work. Sometimes you're doing it alone. You're doing a lot of the work alone. So not getting compensated for it is very, it is not fair," Naigaga said. She said she reached out to the agency and got "radio silence."

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"I didn't know how I'm going to pay my next month's bills because it's Canada. We live paycheque to paycheque," Naigaga said. "We're doing the jobs we do because we need that extra money and we're taking time away from families." The nurses stopped working temporarily after realizing they were not getting paid. Naigaga said that created staffing issues for the hospital and more burnout for nurses who were working without a fully staffed emergency room.

In a statement, the Saskatchewan Health Authority said it is aware of "payroll issues" between EZ Care and some of its nurses, but "cannot comment nor intervene in any contractual obligations between another employer and its contractors." The authority said patient care has not been impacted. It said it hired EZ Care through an open request-for-proposals process and is no longer requesting new contracts through the agency. The SHA spent $75.8 million on travel nurses in the 2024-2025 fiscal year, according to Saskatchewan's provincial auditor's report this year.

The nurses said they asked the SHA to withhold payment to EZ Care and pay them directly, but the authority refused because its contract was with the agency, not the nurses. Shalu said travel nurses are typically hired as independent contractors, not employees, and labour lawyers they contacted told them that limits their options. David Camfield, a professor of labour studies and sociology at the University of Manitoba, said the situation raises questions about whether the nurses should have been classified as contractors. "There's a big difference between someone who's a genuinely independent contractor … and someone who's been classified as an independent contractor, but whose actual relationship to the employer is really one of an employee," Camfield said in an interview. He described the setup as a "triangular relationship" where the agency is the employer on paper, but the nurses are managed day to day by SHA staff, making the health authority the de facto employer.

Camfield said the bigger problem is the public health-care system's reliance on agencies to fill vacancies, which leaves facilities without stable, permanent staff. "We really need to be asking questions about why is the health-care system being starved of the necessary resources that would be needed to provide nurses with stable, high-quality jobs," he said. "I think it would be a mistake to let either of them off the hook here." Shalu and Naigaga are now back at work through a different agency. They are hoping the SHA can still help them get paid for the work they did. CBC tried to reach EZ Care by phone and email but has not heard back.

With files from CBC News