Report warns of longer wait times, overcrowded Ontario hospitals amid government budget constraints

Woodstock General Hospital is seen in Woodstock, Ont., Thursday, May 22, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nicole Osborne

A new report is warning that Ontario hospitals will be dealing with longer wait times, rushed care and overcrowding due to funding shortfalls by the Doug Ford provincial government.

CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, the largest health care union in the province, held a news conference on Tuesday to share its new report stating the government’s budgetary constraints on hospital funding will further sink an already drowning health care system.

“The government is choosing to starve our public hospitals with another round of reductions to staffing levels and bed capacity,” Michael Hurley, president of CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, said on Tuesday. “We expect better from the Ontario government. We expect them to step up here.”

The union stated that the Ford government recently directed hospitals to plan and balance their budgets with the assumption of getting a two per cent annual increase in funding over the next three years. The union said that increase is short of the six per cent average since 2020 and will force hospitals to make further cuts in the face of rising deficits.

The report stated that an analysis by the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario showed if no changes to the budget are made, the government’s plan would entail the loss of 9,000 nurses and personal support worker positions across the health care sector by 2027-28. The union added, currently, at least 1,000 jobs are being cut in hospitals in North Bay, Hamilton, Ottawa, Niagara and the Greater Toronto Area.

“The financial accountability office says that based on the three-year budget plan tabled by this government in March, and reinforced in the fall, that Ontario hospitals will shed 2,500 hospital beds, and layoff or eliminate 7,500 nursing positions and about 2,000 personal health care aide support positions,” Hurley said.

“All these positions intimately involved in patient care and all of them working in a system which already had the fewest staff to patients and the fewest beds of any hospital system in Canada.”

The union’s report examines data on hospital staffing, capacity and funding, and offers recommendations to address patient needs and restore capacity in the sector.

Hurley said there are currently 73,000 people in Ontario who are waiting for surgery beyond the recommended surgical wait times for their conditions and 2,000 people, or more, being cared for on stretchers in hospital hallways.

“This government promised to clear the surgical backlogs and this government promised to eliminate hallway medicine but in fact both of those problems have intensified significantly,” he said.

“A population that is aging and growing is placing inordinate demands on the health care system and the government’s response is to tell the hospitals to come up with cuts for each of these next three years over which the aging and growing population will be showing up in even greater numbers demanding care.”

“This is bad government, this is a cynical exercise in budget math, and this is a failing the needs of the Ontario people.”

Doug Allan, senior CUPE researcher and author of the report, spoke at the news conference, saying Ontario funds and staffs its hospitals at the lowest rate across Canada. He added Ontario would need to add 48,000 hospital staff to match the national average.

To reach the average staffing levels in the rest of Canada, the report states the province would need to increase nursing and inpatient staff by 17,000 extra full time equivalent, marking a 36 per cent increase. The province would also need to add 20,000 full-time support staff employees, a 54 per cent increase in addition to more staff in other departments.

The report states that low staffing levels mean more waiting for Ontario residents. According to the most recent data reported by the provincial government in March 2024, the union stated there were nearly 73,000 patients in Ontario who waited longer than clinically recommended for their surgeries, up from 36,360 in 2019.

“Ontario hospitals are riddled by hallway healthcare, long waits, unsafe bed occupancy levels, widespread violence against staff, burnt-out staff, and backed up emergency rooms,” Allan said. “Our report looks at the issues driving these problems and discusses how the current funding plans will make those problems significantly worse unless they are changed and changed quickly.”

He added that hospital expenditures per capital in the rest of the Canada are nine per cent higher than in Ontario.

“To match the rest of Canada, Ontario would have to increase funding by 2.3 billion dollars,” he said. “The shortfall is particularly hard felt for hospital patient care. For nursing inpatient services, we would have to spend 32 per cent more to match the rest of Canada.”

In the short term, the union is advising the Ford government to add 6,200 staffed beds to improve service levels, hire 48,000 full-time staff to reach the national per-capita average, increase core hospital funding by $3.2 billion to match the rest of Canada and after the funding catch-up noted above, plan to fund at least five to six per cent annual growth needs.

“The most recent budget, the 25-26 budget, will make the situation significantly worse as funding has slowed to a crawl,” Allan said. “Fortunately, the budget has been a very unreliable indicator of spending on hospitals and healthcare”

Allan stated that the government has repeatedly revised its hospital spending plans in the past as communities and health care providers raised concerns of funding and capacity plans. He added that the 2024-25 budget plan was to cut healthcare funding by $5 million dollars, but in the end, the government spent $11.5 billion more than the 2024-25 budget plan.

“This is in no way an effective way for hospitals to plan their budgets. This year we are late in the year, and we are still waiting for a hospital funding increase as layoff and cutbacks hit hospitals,” he said. “If the funding plan is not changed, we are looking at even greater hospital deficits, job loss, service cuts and further deterioration in hospital working capital.”

A recent CUPE-commissioned poll by research firm Nanos found that 57 per cent of Ontarians disapproved of the Ford government’s management of hospitals and 94 per cent supported more hospital funding to avoid job cuts or delays in surgeries.

“We are here today on behalf on the health workers we represent,” Hurley said. “We are here today to ask the government fund hospitals at their real costs … We are asking them to guarantee multiyear stable funding so that they can plan.”

“The current system of announcing, for example, a two per cent in crease in their budgets in March and making them crawl and bed for 10 to 11 months, hacking and slashing their budgets before coming up with extra money is not a solution to a system that is organized to provide care to people in moments of personal health crisis.”

A spokesperson for the Ontario Minister of Health Sylvia Jones told CTV News Toronto in a statement on Tuesday that the “claims” made in the report are “misguided.”

“Ontario is proud to have one of the largest publicly funded healthcare systems in the world, with the largest healthcare workforce in Canada, and we continue to make record investments in our healthcare system, including investing $91.5 billion this year alone, a $30 billion increase since 2018,” the spokesperson said.

“Since 2018, our government has also increased hospital annual support by 52 per cent. This is in addition to a $60 billion plan for healthcare infrastructure across the province, the 50 new MRI and CT machines we have added, over 100,000 new nurses and nearly 20,000 new physicians that have joined the workforce since 2018 who continue to support hospitals across the province.”

She added that the recent staff cuts in hospitals do not affect patient care, saying “the changes being currently made by hospitals address non-clinical, administrative functions to improve efficiency and connect more people to the care they need when they need it.”

The Ontario Hospital Association told the provincial government in its submission ahead of the spring budget that the sector faces a structural deficit of $1 billion and needs not just more money this year but a predictable, multi-year funding plan.

“Worryingly, our financial reserves — also called working capital — which are really intended to be for long-term, capital-related expenses like medical and diagnostic equipment or refurbishing and rebuilding hospitals ... those working capital dollars are being used to actually pay for operating expenses, and that is a sign of a sector under real, serious financial (pressure),” association president and CEO Anthony Dale said.

Hospitals have been told to immediately implement any low-risk cost-saving moves they come up with and Dale said that has already been happening. He gave examples such as declining to fill vacant positions and shifting work between professions, including getting registered practical nurses to perform work that has been done by registered nurses.

“The last thing we want to do is start examining other areas where expenditures might be considered for reduction and ... there’s really only a few areas left,” Dale said.

That includes spending reductions in core inpatient services, closing non-core inpatient services and consolidating programs, he said.

With files from The Canadian Press