TORONTO - An outside review of spending habits and expense abuses at the Ontario agency tasked with creating electronic health records is "a joke," the opposition parties charged Tuesday as they again demanded Health Minister David Caplan's resignation.

The Liberal government set up eHealth Ontario last fall after the first agency appointed to create electronic health records spent about $650 million and failed to produce anything of substance.

EHealth has come under fire for doling out $5 million in untendered contracts in just a few months and for hiring consultants at up to $300 an hour. Some billed taxpayers extra for such things as a cup of tea or a biscuit at Tim Hortons.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers was paid $27,000 in January for a report on eHealth, which found the agency's spending practices were appropriate. Caplan has announced the same firm will now do another review of procurement and expenses at the provincial agency.

"Appointing a firm of consultants to decide if consultants are being paid the right amount is laughable at best and a very sad state of where we are at," said NDP critic France Gelinas.

"It makes no sense to have an outside consultant decide how much consultants should be paid."

The Progressive Conservatives said the latest PriceWaterhouseCoopers review is "a sham" aimed at hiding what's really happening at eHealth Ontario.

"This review is nothing more than a punch-line for a terrible joke," said interim Opposition Leader Bob Runciman.

"It's designed to detract attention from the fact that the McGuinty Liberals have looked the other way while eHealth continues to ignore, bend and twist the rules on the taxpayer's dime."

Caplan admitted he was concerned about some of the reports coming out about eHealth, but said the agency's work is too important to let it be derailed by concerns over spending habits and expense abuses.

He vowed the scope of the second review would be more in depth, and would be backed up by an investigation by Ontario auditor general Jim McCarter.

"It is much broader than anything they have looked at before," Caplan told reporters.

"We've asked them to look at the management practices and at the financial controls."

The Tories and NDP called for Caplan to resign and for the chairman and chief executive of eHealth Ontario to both be fired -- demands which were dismissed by Premier Dalton McGuinty.

"We believe that we can do better," McGuinty said about eHealth.

"We believe that some things have happened under rules which were in place -- in fairness to the folks that run eHealth -- that we ought to change."

Runciman said the Liberals were allowing eHealth to conduct "the same pattern of abuse of taxpayers' dollars" that was uncovered at its predecessor, the Smart Systems Health Agency.

"That agency was quietly disbanded last fall, but the McGuinty Liberals have allowed the same culture of entitlement to persist at eHealth Ontario," said Runciman.

"We are seeing people who feel a sense of entitlement to bill the taxpayer for all kinds of expenses that are not acceptable, and they're not even willing to come forward and say `mea culpa, we shouldn't have done this,"' complained Gelinas.

Both McGuinty and Caplan suggested consultants hired by eHealth for thousands of dollars a day were following standard practices in the private sector when they billed extra for minor expenses on top of their per diems.

But they said those practices are not acceptable in the public sector.