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The Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU), which represents thousands of hospital workers in Ontario, leaders from CUPE local 6364, which represents nurses and other inside workers at Lakeridge Health, joined together to urge a different approach to health care over the next four years.

“We need different policies. We need the government to focus on its actual job and we need a government to focus on building the capacity in health care,” said Doug Allan, senior researcher at CUPE.

Allan was pointing to publicly available statistics which show:

• 1,860 people on stretchers in hospital hallways, up from 826 in June 2018 when the premier promised to end hallway medicine.
• 2.5 million citizens in Ontario are without a family doctor
• Palliative home-care patients dying without painkillers and medical supplies
• 250,000 people are waiting for surgeries, 11,000 of whom died on the wait-list
• Nearly 50,000 people are waiting for long-term care
• Constant ER closures in small towns are common over the past few years

Pam Parkes, president of CUPE Local 6364 at Lakeridge Health, which represents 3,200 employees, said “I go around and see my co-workers, working their butts off, and they don’t have enough staff to finish the work,” she said.

“People are burnt out, they don’t know what to do, but they still show up for work. This is more important than anything else on the ticket of the election,” Parkes said.

“Remember when he was on TV telling us we’re all heroes. We’ll I’m one of those heroes, I’m a registered practical nurse and I am damn proud and we do not have the staffing,” she said.

Michael Hurley, longtime president of OCHU, said hospitals across the province need a funding boost of about $2 billion year-over-year for the next four years straight.

“That would get the 1,800 patients off the stretchers and that would get the 250,000 patients who are waiting for surgeries and get them off and running and would add beds and staff and meet the needs of our growing population,” Hurley said.

He said consecutive governments of all stripes have underfunded hospitals “but now we’re at a crisis. It needs to be addressed. It has to be done.”

The OCHC and CUPE said the latest figures show Ontario hospitals have a deficit in 2024-25 of $800 million with Lakeridge Health facing a $40 million deficit.

The unions have suggested the following fixes to the system, which they have estimated will cost at least $2 billion more per year.

• Improve hospital capacity to match the needs of an aging and growing population, by adding staffed hospital beds.
• Address the staffing crisis by improving compensation and working conditions, and providing incentives such as free tuition to students in nursing and PSW programs
• End private sector delivery of acute, long-term care and community health services
• Ban agency nurses to reduce staffing costs, and invest that money in improving compensation and working conditions for in-house workers
• Improving staffing in LTC to meet the four-hours of daily care benchmark and expand capacity to reduce wait-lists
• End contracting out of services across health care, and run LTC and home care on a public, not-for-profit basis
• Expand the use of nurse practitioners to lead primary care clinics