Angry in the Great White North

The money was used to fund a high-tech health system for remote northern communities:

The [Northern Ontario Remote Telecommunications Health, later changed to Northern Ontario Rural Tele-Health] NORTH Network, a program administered through Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre, was originally developed as a two-year pilot project to evaluate the feasibility and viability of telemedicine to improve access to services by northeastern Ontario residents. In association with over 70 partners, the Network will offer numerous telehealth sites throughout Ontario and provide a link to Winnipeg, Manitoba. The project will link rural and remote communities in northern Ontario, and referral centres such as Thunder Bay and Sudbury to academic health science centres in southern Ontario and Winnipeg.

This is consistent with one of the goals of SICEAI, and that is to build "community capacity". Obviously the population capacity of a town is constrained in part by its ability to provide medical care. Above a certain size, a town doctor doesn't cut it, and NORTH is an attempt to provide hospital-level care in these communities without building a hospital in each one.

Why was this so hard to find? Nowhere is SICEAI associated with NORTH or Sunnybrook. Funding for NORTH comes from diverse sources such as the Ministry of Health and the North Ontario Development Fund, as well as the one-off contribution from SICEAI in 2003-2004. Not every contribution has a helpful news release online to describe it, and so I could never connect SICEAI and Sunnybrook. Thanks to Access to Information and the help of Romer Diaz-Rivas at Industry Canada, we finally know where this particular chunk of taxpayers' money went.