TORONTO - All Ontario hospitals will have to start reporting on the number of cases they have of the potentially deadly C. difficile bacteria starting Sept. 30, Health Minister George Smitherman announced Tuesday as the opposition accused the Liberal government of covering up the extent of the outbreak.

The Conservatives and New Democrats claim Ontario was too slow to come up with a plan to deal with C. difficile after it claimed 2,000 lives in Quebec in 2003, and insist some of the 260 deaths reported so far in seven Ontario hospitals could have been prevented.

They also say the public has a right to know the extent of the C. difficile outbreak in all 157 hospitals in the province -- data that Smitherman said Tuesday he simply doesn't have.

"Either your government doesn't know the answer, which certainly speaks to incompetence and a total disregard for patient safety, or this is a coverup by the government,'' Conservative health critic Elizabeth Witmer told the legislature. "Either way, what is needed today to give the public some assurance that everything is being done that needs to be done is a thorough, independent investigation.''

Smitherman rejected a public inquiry, saying the government and hospital officials already have all the information they need to deal with C. difficile outbreaks, and said an investigation would only delay new patient safety protocols even longer.

He also dismissed Witmer's complaint that the government should be able to tell the public immediately about the extent of the C. difficile problem across the province, saying the information is not available and won't be until a website is set up for hospitals to use for their mandatory reporting.

"It's not the simplest matter to ask 157 unique corporations to present information in a consistent format,'' Smitherman said. "In the absence of this kind of consistent reporting, there's no baseline information. I will learn that information on exactly the same day that the rest of the people in Ontario learn it.''

Smitherman said C. difficile will be just the first of many types of infectious diseases that hospitals will be required to report to the public over the next year, and warned that there will be a lot of information -- some of it disconcerting -- about patient safety.

"The mechanism that we would envision is that all hospitals would report in to one central website that will provide that information quite readily to Ontarians,'' he said. "What Ontarians will gain benefit from in about a one-year period is an extraordinary range of new information about a wide variety of matters that relate to patient safety in hospital environments.''

Smitherman didn't want to reveal all of his plans Tuesday, but said hospitals would also be required to report all cases of drug-resistant superbugs such as MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

But Witmer said Tuesday she couldn't understand why Smitherman isn't ordering hospitals to immediately report outbreaks of C. difficile.

"The data is readily available,'' she said. "If anyone calls a hospital, they can give you the number of patients who have had C. difficile, the number of patients who have died. I can't believe that the Ministry