Health Minister Deb Matthews says she first learned that Dr. Chris Mazza was paid almost $10 million for operating the scandal-plagued ORNGE air ambulance service when she read about it in the Star.

“I hadn’t added up six years worth of payments . . . why would I?” she told reporters Tuesday after defending herself in the legislature for not reading an audit showing that Mazza received $9.3 million in taxpayers’ money over six years.

Opposition party leaders said her response is further proof the embattled health minister should be fired.

“I can’t believe it,” Hudak said Tuesday at Queen’s Park, where Matthews admitted that neither she nor her deputy health minister read the final special audit received more than a year ago and instead turned it over unopened to the Ontario Provincial Police.

Matthews said she read an interim report and based on what she learned from that document — which she says did not include the $9.3 million figure — she simply passed the final forensic audit along to police.

The ORNGE affair has dogged the Liberal government since the Star exposed highly controversial business practices at the air ambulance service, which led to the firing of Mazza and the board of directors. An OPP investigation into ORNGE is ongoing.

“If I had a cabinet minister who was dealing with this type of scandal, where somebody was ripping off taxpayers for millions of dollars, and . . . you don’t read the audit, that minister would no longer serve in my cabinet. They would be out and so should Deb Matthews,” Hudak said.

It is not the first time opposition critics have called for Matthews to be fired.

The Liberal government has been criticized for its lack of oversight on several issues, including eHealth, ORNGE and the $1.1 billion gas plants debacle.

New Democratic Party Leader Andrea Horwath said Matthews’ complacency is “very disturbing.”

“The bottom line is as minister of health she needs to know these things,” Horwath said.

“The minister has proven on a number of different files . . . that she doesn’t have what it takes to be a competent health minister.”

The Star revealed Monday what Matthews did not bother to find out — that Mazza, who is now an emergency room physician in Thunder Bay, was making far more than what was posted publicly on the Public Sector Disclosure list.

For example, according to the so-called sunshine list, Mazza was paid $284,999 in 2006 but the internal ORNGE accounting documents reveal it was actually $869,354.

Matthews insisted to reporters that a legislative committee probing ORNGE was given the information on Mazza’s income from the air ambulance service and related companies a year ago.

“And they haven’t bothered to go through it obviously,” she said.

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Tory MPP Frank Klees, a member of the committee, told the Star that Matthews was wrong. “The fact is we do not have that forensic audit. We should have that forensic audit.”

Among other things, the OPP is probing a consulting deal that saw one of Mazza’s companies receive $4.7 million from an Italian firm that sold 12 helicopters to ORNGE. An additional $2 million was to have been paid, but that part of the deal did not go through.