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Ministry of Health spokesperson refutes many of statements made by hospital union researcher
Published May 20, 2026 • Last updated 15 hours ago • 4 minute read
Sharon Richer, secretary-treasurer of Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, and report author Andrew Longhurst made a stop in North Bay to decry the state of health in the province and especially in northern Ontario. May 20,2026 Photo by GREG ESTABROOKSArticle content
Wait times in the emergency room at the North Bay Regional Health Centre have increased almost 300 percent in the last five years.
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A new report, compiled by senior researcher Andrew Longhurst, of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative, shows a dramatic increase in emergency department wait times.
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Provincially, 90 percent of patients spent 44 hours in the emergency department awaiting hospital admission in 2024/25 – a 52 per cent increase over five years.
However, emergency room wait times at NBRHC surged far more rapidly for hospital admission as well as an initial assessment.
The report also states that the North Bay hospital also saw an increase of 103 percent in wait-times for an emergency department assessment, with 90 percent of patients waiting 7.3 hours in 2024-25 compared to 3.6 hours in 2020-21.
Longhurst and Sharon Richer, secretary-treasurer of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, have been touring northern Ontario. They have been touting Longhurst’s report entitled: Failure, By Design: Ontario’s deepening hospital funding crisis.
The majority of Ontario’s 136 hospitals, including the North Bay Regional Health Centre, have carried operational deficits since 2022, and this puts an already precarious public system at risk according to the report.
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Longhurst says these shortfalls and wait times are a double whammy to those seeking health care in Ontario, especially northern Ontario.
Plagued by underfunding, the North Bay hospital ran fiscal deficits in each of the last three years, with a significant increase in emergency department wait-times.
Making the case that health care spending is insufficient, Longhurst countered with what he dubbed “misleading claims” by the Ontario government about health care, such as the finance minister’s recent statement about spending being “unsustainable,” Longhurst said it’s worse in the north,
“The fact that hospitals in northern Ontario are the ones bearing the brunt of the funding crisis coming down from Queen’s Park,” he said.
“We are not seeing the hospital staff capacity that’s needed to reduce wait times. The cost pressures are increasing at about six percent for the hospital sector, this comes from the Ontario Hospital Association.
“The provincial government is saying we will only see a four percent increase in base and targeted funding. So, there is a (funding) gap there that the provincial government is refusing to put those dollars there.”
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Failure, By Design also reports that total Ontario health care spending merely rose to 7.6 percent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product in 2023 from 7.4 percent of GDP in 2014. Even still, Ontario ranked last in per-capita hospital and total health care spending in Canada in 2023.
Richer said the hospital division of CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees), says that the sharp increase in province-wide wait-times occurred before the latest round of hospital job cuts beginning at the end of last year, including 40 job cuts in North Bay. Richer believes the health care situation is getting worse.
“However, the government’s stubborn refusal to meet rising hospital costs is taking us backwards whereby jobs are being eliminated every day even as staffing shortages suffocate the system,” said Richer, who joined Longhurst at the press conference at the North Bay Public Library. “The political choice to starve our public hospitals is a failure by design.”
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The report concludes: “We strongly recommend that the provincial government implement an aggressive plan to address the hospital funding and capacity crisis — rather than laying off staff. Hospitals need certainty in funding levels, which should increase by six percent annually. Without this, the consequences are disastrous for patients.”
A spokesperson for the Minister of Health and Deputy Premier, Sylvia Jones, refuted many of the statements made by the hospital union researcher.
“The claims made in the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ report are misguided,” says the health ministry spokesperson.
“Ontario has one of the largest publicly funded healthcare systems in the world, and our government is investing over $101 billion this year alone, including a four percent increase in the hospital sector for the fourth consecutive year, to connect people to the care they need when they need it. Since 2018, we’ve also increased funding for North Bay Regional Health Centre by over 35 percent.”
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The response from the health minister’s office also targeted statement about staffing issues at Ontario’s hospitals.
“We have one of the largest healthcare workforces in Canada, adding over 100,000 new nurses and nearly 20,000 new physicians since 2018, some of the shortest wait times for critical procedures, reducing the annual total volume of ED visits by nearly 200,000, with over 83 percent of people receiving surgery within the clinically recommended times, and the highest primary care attachment rate in the country,” said the ministry spokesperson.
The government claims it is expanding health care facilities all over Ontario.
“We continue to build on this progress by getting shovels in the ground for over 50 hospital redevelopment projects, adding new MRI and CT machines in communities across the province, upskilling nurses to work in emergency departments, expanding programs like Learn and Stay and, taking bold action to make it easier to access care in the community, including allowing pharmacists to treat common ailments and our plan to connect every person to a primary care provider by 2029,” the health minister spokesperson concluded.
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