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Case summary: A Vancouver doctor lost his B.C. licence after an RCMP fraud and narcotics investigation — then simply moved to Ontario, where the College granted him a new licence. He went on to run Kitchener-Waterloo walk-in clinics while facing further narcotics trafficking charges and, eventually, findings that he had sexually assaulted patients.

Dr. Pradeep Kumar Verma: Fraud and Narcotics in B.C., Then a Second Act — and a Second Revocation — in Ontario

Dr. Pradeep Kumar Verma practised in Vancouver in the early 1990s, describing himself as a doctor who took pride in caring for drug addicts, out of an office on Commercial Drive. That practice became the subject of a seven-month RCMP investigation, and in May 1993 Verma was arrested and charged with eight counts of fraud and thirteen counts of unlawfully prescribing a narcotic. The fraud charges centred on billing British Columbia's provincial health plan for services that were never provided; the narcotics charges centred on codeine prescriptions issued in violation of the Narcotic Control Act.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia revoked Verma's licence in June 1993. In May 1994 he pleaded guilty and was fined a total of $1,000 — $500 on each of two counts — rather than jailed, a sentence the court tied in part to a depressive disorder that had required two weeks of psychiatric hospitalization. Court records presented at sentencing showed that during the RCMP's undercover operation, two officers posing as recovering addicts on a methadone program had simply to ask, without any real examination, and Verma would write them prescriptions for Valium, sedatives, and Tylenol with codeine — nine prescriptions to the male officer and three to the female officer over the course of the investigation. He was also found to have billed B.C.'s Medical Services Plan $188 for eight visits by the two undercover officers that never actually took place.

A Fresh Start in Ontario

Rather than remain in British Columbia, Verma relocated to Ontario in 1993. Despite the B.C. revocation, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) granted him a licence to practise, though initially with restrictions on prescribing narcotics. By December 1994 he had opened a walk-in clinic at 150 Wissler Road in Waterloo, telling a reporter at the time that the B.C. charges against him had been minor and that he had already paid the price for them.

The Waterloo Region Record's coverage of his arrival prompted broader concern about how easily a doctor disciplined in one province could resume practice in another. Follow-up reporting in the Record and the Hamilton Spectator noted that patients had no way of learning a doctor's out-of-province disciplinary history, and quoted a local MPP calling for reforms — including barring OHIP billing privileges for doctors who had lost a licence elsewhere — to close what was described as a loophole in Ontario's regulatory oversight of physicians.

Expansion, Then Criminal Charges

By May 1995, Verma was operating a second Kitchener-Waterloo area office in addition to his Waterloo clinic, treating close to 1,000 patients in the region. That same month, he was charged with three counts of trafficking in narcotics and with breaching a condition of his bail related to those charges. Separately, after two female patients complained to police that he had touched them inappropriately during examinations, the then 38-year-old doctor was also charged with sexual assault. Verma continued to see patients at his clinics even after the charges became public, and was later held in custody at the Waterloo Detention Centre in Cambridge pending trial, where he told a reporter he believed he was the victim of a vendetta and maintained that he was only ever trying to help people.

In May 1996, a CPSO discipline panel found Verma guilty of professional misconduct after two patients complained that he had inappropriately touched them during medical examinations.

2003: A Second Licence Revoked

Years later, in June 2003, the CPSO Discipline Committee found Verma guilty of professional misconduct for sexually assaulting three female patients, revoking the Ontario licence he had been granted a decade earlier despite his B.C. record. Toronto Star coverage of the decision noted this was the second time in Verma's career that a medical college had stripped him of the right to practise. The case, and the years-long gap between the CPSO's 1996 referral for a disciplinary hearing and the case's ultimate resolution, was later cited publicly as an example of the slow pace of Ontario's physician discipline process; the College's president defended the process in a published response, saying delays can occur at the request of a physician or their lawyer and that a hearing must be seen through to completion once launched.

Note: both the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia and the CPSO have since removed Verma's disciplinary record from their public online registers, and his case does not appear to be indexed on CanLII. The newspaper coverage cited below is accordingly the primary surviving public record of this case.

A Personal Account, by Dr. Terry Polevoy

I have firsthand knowledge of this case. Verma and his family came into my own medical office in 1994 looking to rent space, and told me he had completed a neurology residency in British Columbia but had not passed his FRCPC exams. I went on to work alongside him — as one of several physicians on staff, not as someone who ran the practice — at the Waterloo Walk-In Clinic, next to the University of Waterloo campus, where I had already been practising part-time since June 1990.

It was what I saw at that clinic that triggered my own investigation of Verma. He would bring in entire families he had previously treated while working at a notorious narcotics mill on Highland Road in Kitchener, and at times these patients would flood into the clinic we shared, all at once.

I contacted the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia directly and spoke, off the record, with a senior investigator there, who told me about the serious problems in Verma's history. I then called the CPSO to file a formal complaint — and the College essentially did nothing with it. I subsequently told the owner of the Walk-In Clinic what I had learned about Verma, a step that led to my own resignation from my part-time role there. Verma was eventually fired from the Walk-In Clinic as a result. He went on to open his own clinic in a house at the corner of Louisa and King Streets in Waterloo, and later a second office in a former dry-cleaning store at Wismer and Northfield in Waterloo — an office with no renovations done to it at all, which, like the Walk-In Clinic before it, was again flooded with patients seeking narcotics. I have photographs of both locations. This case is also the subject of a chapter in my book. I have since reached out to both Colleges asking why Verma's disciplinary records were removed from their public databases.

Timeline

Sources