Randall Denley: Ford needs a rational plan to fix hospital overcrowding

Unfortunately for the Ford government, facts do little to support the argument that hospital funding is generous or even adequate. Photo by TIM KROCHAK/Postmedia/File

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When it comes to Ontario’s hospitals, the Doug Ford government is living in a parallel universe. According to the government, emergency room wait times are short, an average of just 1.9 hours to see a doctor. Low-urgency patients leave the hospital in 3.1 hours. Hospital funding is generous. Just this fiscal year alone, hospital spending went up by $1.1 billion, an increase of nearly four per cent. Hospital spending has gone up over 50 per cent since 2018.

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Hospitals, emergency room doctors, health care unions, and the public have a sharply contrasting view. Last spring, the Ontario Medical Association polled 15 per cent of the province’s emergency room doctors and found that 74 per cent cited overcrowding that was either severe or critical, preventing them from providing timely care on most of their shifts.

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An Ipsos survey earlier this year found that 56 per cent of Ontarians polled thought the government had done a poor job of fixing overcrowding and wait times in emergency rooms. Only 17 per cent thought the government had done a good job. Asked if they would feel confident in getting timely emergency care, only 30 per cent said yes.

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A report earlier this week by the Canadian Union of Public Employees said underfunding has caused hospitals to burn through $2 billion in working capital since 2020, forcing them to borrow to make ends meet. The Ontario Hospital Association (OHA) asked the government for $2.8 billion this year to deal with those structural, inflation-driven shortfalls. It received $1.7 billion less than it sought.

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Unfortunately for the Ford government, facts do little to support the argument that hospital funding is generous or even adequate. Yes, more money is being spent and new hospital beds are being added, but what’s lacking is a convincing plan to alleviate the long-standing chronic overcrowding in Ontario’s hospitals.

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The province’s hospitals typically operate around 95 per cent capacity, the government says. The generally accepted benchmark for safe acute-care hospital operations is 85 per cent. It’s that lack of capacity that makes it difficult to move patients out of emergency and into a hospital bed. That backs up the ERs and leads to the hallway medicine Ford promised to end eight years ago.

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That congestion is not particularly surprising. Ontario has the lowest per capita spending on hospitals of all Canadian provinces, according to a 2025 report by the province’s Financial Accountability Office (FAO). The same report found the number of hospital beds In Ontario was 230 per 100,000 population while the national average is 249 beds.

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Despite that, the OHA says Ontario has an efficient hospital system with the second-lowest provincial hospitalization rate, the lowest length of stay in acute care and the lowest inpatient cost.