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Like a boxer punching away at a cut above an opponent's half-closed eye, Rob Ford has been hammering George Smitherman over the eHealth affair.

When Mr. Smitherman questioned Mr. Ford's budget plans at a recent Citytv debate, Mr. Ford fired back: "I can't believe Mr. Smitherman has the audacity to ask that question. When you were the health minister, you squandered a billion dollars on the eHealth scandal. Where is it? Is it your lobbyist friends, your consultant friends? What friends got the billion dollars?"

"That's a lie and you know it," rejoined Mr. Smitherman. "Your repetition of that lie is unbecoming."

Unbecoming to say the least. Criticizing the former health minister over his role in eHealth is fair play, but in Mr. Ford's hands the whole affair has been reduced to what Mr. Smitherman calls a "one-word slur against my record."

The eHealth scandal, if it can be called that, unfolded in two chapters. In the first, newspapers revealed that the provincial government's eHealth agency had awarded millions in untendered contracts to private consultants, some of whom had (horrors of horrors) charged expenses for things like tea and Choco Bites while collecting hundreds of dollars an hour.

Mr. Smitherman had no direct role in this. He was provincial health minister for 4 1/2 years, but Premier Dalton McGunity moved him to the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure in June, 2008, three months before the government launched eHealth, to work on creating electronic health records for Ontarians. He was in no position to scrutinize eHealth when it handed out handsome contracts to consultants, much less to direct the money to his "lobbyist friends" - a slur if there ever was one.

The second chapter came when Ontario Auditor-General Jim McCarter issued his report on eHealth in October, 2009. Apart from criticizing eHealth for handing out consulting contracts without competitive bidding, Mr. McCarter reported that the government had spent an eye-popping $1-billion since 2002 to create electronic records. Despite all that time and money, he said, the network set up by the government still has relatively few users, so "the value of this investment, at least to date, has not been realized."

As health minister for more than half of that period, Mr. Smitherman has to bear some blame for that - and he does. "I have to take responsibility for the conclusions that he draws," he told The Globe's editorial board this month. "I have to acknowledge that the results weren't good enough." But it was not his fault alone. Various health ministers under two governments, Conservative then Liberal, mismanaged the difficult job of turning millions of paper health records into electronic ones.

Mr. Smitherman argues that he has learned from his mistakes and "that the lessons that I've learned there make me better positioned to be a leader in tackling some of the challenges that Toronto faces." Voters can determine for themselves whether they buy that or whether he is merely trying to wriggle off the hook. They can weigh his overall record as health minister, too, and may find it wanting.

But, whatever they conclude, it is simply not true that Mr. Smitherman personally "squandered," "wasted" or "blew" a billion dollars, which is the kind of language that Mr. Ford uses - and, for that matter, that deputy mayor Joe Pantalone uses.

EHealth is a complex affair with many avenues and many authors. Mr. Ford has turned it into a simple tale of waste and corruption to pin on his rival. Crude simplification - it's the Ford way.

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