HSN CEO Dominic Giroux will be able to return to Laurentian University as a full professor should he leave his position at the hospital, according to documents released this week.
The documents are the result of a grievance filed by the Laurentian University Faculty Association, which fought for the right to see the deal Giroux signed with the university when he left for HSN. The grievance was denied, based on the fact LU had already revealed the basic details of the agreement to the union.
Among the details that have been made public as part of the grievance process, Giroux is considered to be on unpaid leave from the school, and that the length of unpaid leave “was indeterminate.”
Should Giroux return to Laurentian, he has the right to return as a full professor, and immediately becomes a member of the faculty association. And if he returns, he is immediately entitled to one year paid leave.
As reported by Sudbury.com in 2017, Giroux negotiated a lucrative contract when he became head of Greater Sudbury's hospital.
His base salary at HSN is $314,407, but Giroux will receive a 15-per-cent bonus for hitting certain targets, such as not running a defict or reducing wait times.
His base salary rises to $340,870 in the fifth year of his contract, and his performance bonus can be as high as $51,130. In addition to his HSN salary, Giroux is also being paid about $78,000 a year to lead the research institute, a figure that could rise to $91,000 if he hits the performance targets. By the end of the five years, the combined salaries and bonuses could put him close to $500,000 a year.
"He's a good negotiator," Floyd Laughren, the chair of HSN's board of governors, joked at the time.
Supporting Laughren's contention Giroux is a good negotiator, during the September 2017 trial in Sudbury related to the byelection scandal, it emerged Giroux helped engineer Glenn Thibeault's defection from the federal New Democratic Party to the provincial Liberals.
After NDP MPP Joe Cimino resigned in November 2014, Giroux suggested to Pierre Cyr, a member of the Ontario Liberal Party executive council, that Thibeault may be interested in running. That prompted a call from Pat Sorbara, the former chair of the Liberal election campaign, who asked Giroux to speak with the then NDP MP.
“I urged him to think about it seriously,” Giroux testified at the 2017 trial. “I told him to do it.”
