A new report from CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions said Ontario hospitals are underfunded to the tune of $5 billion per year when compared to other provinces

A new report warns that patient care at Sault Area Hospital will face increasing strain without a major funding boost from the province.

Published by CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, Pushed over the brink: the escalating assault on Ontario’s hospitals reports that Ontario hospitals need an extra $5 billion in annual funding for core services to match the rest of the country.

At Sault Area Hospital, that translates to an extra $40 million per year to meet the funding per capita seen in other provinces across Canada.

“That’s just to get us back to where we were previously, and had been for many decades where we had similar levels of funding as the rest of Canada,” said Doug Allan, senior researcher at CUPE National.

Instead, union officials say hospital expenses have consistently climbed around six per cent per year while provincial funding increases have been held to three to four per cent in recent years – leading to a precarious situation where hospitals are understaffed, shedding working capital, and running deficits.

While Ontario hospitals had $2 billion in working capital to cover daily expenses as recently as 2020, that figure plummeted to negative $280 million by the end of 2025

“For the Sault, the working capital the hospital has is negative $13.5 million. That’s a problem for them to come up with,” Allan said.

“They may have to do things like borrow money. It’s not ideal.”

Locally, where hospital beds average 94-per-cent occupancy, an extra 470 full time staff would be needed to meet the national average, along with 55,000 additional staff across Ontario.

However, under the province’s Hospital Sector Stabilization Plan, 1,300 jobs have been cut since last September province-wide, even as hallway health care numbers continue to climb.

Even though the Ford government pledged to end hallway health care in 2018, it’s continued to spike over the past four years – like in the case of Walter Chikoski, a 94-year-old man who was recently cared for in a Sault Area Hospital hallway for more than three days as he awaited an inpatient bed.

“That ($5 billion) would let us get the 2,000 people off stretchers in hospitals and clear the surgical wait lists of about 200,000 people,” said Michael Hurley, president of CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions.

“That older gentleman is emblematic of that … so we’re asking for an investment over a three-year period to clear the wait lists and to clear the people off the stretchers,” Hurley said.

Despite the report’s grim conclusions, the Ministry of Health recently told SooToday the province is making “record investments” to the tune of $101 billion across the health-care system this year – a four-per-cent increase in funding for the fourth straight year.

The Ministry also said it has boosted Sault Area Hospital’s funding by 39 per cent since 2018.

Those are not facts union officials dispute – but they say the investments made by the Ford government simply have not been enough.

“It’s true. Nobody’s ever spent more in the hospitals, but it’s also true that no one in Canada spends less per person than this government does . . . and the impact is played out in people being treated in conditions where they have no privacy, no dignity, no bathroom, no ability to have a conversation,” Hurley said.