Wait times for most priority medical procedures in Ontario have grown despite a rapid expansion of surgeries and scans performed in private clinics, according to a new report.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found median wait times increased for eight of 12 procedures it examined between 2017 and 2025, even as the volume of surgeries performed in for-profit clinics grew more than 10 times faster than those performed in public hospitals.
The results cast doubt on the Ford government’s plans to reduce wait times for healthcare services through greater investment in for-profit facilities, at the tune of $4.1 billion over eight years, the report’s author Andrew Longhurst, a senior researcher at the CCPA, told the Star.
“What this shows is that there has been a policy direction undertaken by the provincial government to favour for-profit facilities, and unfortunately, it has come at the expense of the hospitals,” said Longhurst.
Median wait times for MRI scans increased from 35 days in 2017 to 47 days in 2025, while wait times for CT scans in that same time span remained unchanged, at six days, according to the report.
Both types of scans have been a focus of outsourcing to for-profit facilities, the report states, with publicly funded hours in private clinics increasing by an average annual rate of 14 per cent between 2017 and 2025, compared with a five per cent annual average increase in the rate of scans in public hospitals.
Median wait times for all cancer surgeries tracked by available data have gone up between 2017 and 2025, with increases being the highest for breast cancer (33 per cent), lung cancer (25 per cent) and prostate cancer (18 per cent) surgeries. Cancer surgeries are only performed in a hospital setting.
The growth in wait times for cancer surgeries in hospitals “is an alarm bell,” said Longhurst.
“There’s a concern that as . . . public funding (is) flowing to more profitable, lower complexity procedures like cataract procedures and MRI scans in the private sector, we are losing focus on improving wait times for those more complex surgeries.”
Longhurst said the results in Ontario are consistent with findings in other jurisdictions in Canada and abroad, which suggest that greater for-profit involvement in the delivery of healthcare services contributes to longer public wait times.
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“Simply by opening up additional private facilities to have publicly funded procedures performed doesn’t simply grow the workforce overnight,” he said. “Because when you open a private facility, you still have the same limited workforce to draw upon, including surgeons, operating room nurses and technicians.”
In a comment to the Star, Lily Barnes, press secretary for the Minister of Health Sylvia Jones, said that “the CCPA’s report does not reflect the reality of Ontario’s health-care system.”
“Ontario is proud to lead the country with the lowest wait times for joint surgeries, like hips and knees, and we are continuing to make record investments to keep times down, including $101 billion in our healthcare system this year alone – 64 per cent increase from 2018,” Barnes wrote.
Barnes said the province has shortened wait times for diagnostic imaging by adding 50 new MRI and CT machines in hospitals and increasing publicly funded imaging capacity by 450,000 annual hours since 2018.
“As a result, Ontario now has some of the shortest wait times in the country for MRI and CT scans,” Barnes wrote.
The CCPA report urges the provincial government to stop privatizing surgeries and medical imaging and immediately increase public hospital funding and service capacity.
Longhurst pointed to Windsor Regional Hospital’s three MRI machines, which do not operate 24-hours a day, as an example of “unfunded capacity” that could be increased in public hospitals.
“If there were funding available, they could staff those MRI machines into the wee hours and ensure that more people are getting in to receive their MRI scans more quickly,” he said.
The report analyzed data from 918 for-profit facilities using publicly available sources and data obtained from Freedom of Information requests.