“They need stable, multi-year funding, and they need an infusion of funds,” says Michael Hurley, president of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions.

Luke Hendry
Published Feb 04, 2025

A union representing health care workers is calling for more provincial funding for health care, pointing to statistics indicating care has declined under the Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government.

Amid the campaign leading to the Feb. 27 provincial election, members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) held a brief news conference Tuesday morning outside Belleville General Hospital.

Quinte Health, which operates the hospitals in Belleville, Bancroft, Trenton, and Picton, does not employ any CUPE members.

“We’re trying to ask the all the political parties to put forward real solutions to what are real, really pressing problems for the people of Ontario,” said Michael Hurley, the president of CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Union.

Organizers lined up a trio of stretchers – brought by the union, not from the hospital – along the sidewalk in front of the hospital.

“We’re trying to use these stretchers to symbolize some of the problems with the health care system, including the 2,000 people who are on stretchers today, waiting for a bed,” said Hurley, who also said many are waiting for surgery.

He said there are 2.5 million Ontarians without a family doctor and nearly 50,000 waiting for long-term care.

Hurley said health care in Ontario has “deteriorated significantly” under the Progressive Conservative government.

“You can measure that by the number of people who are waiting for services, the number of people who don’t have doctors, the number of people who can’t get into long-term care, the number of people who die while they wait for surgeries, and the number of people who, for example, have their cancers detected far too late because they don’t have access to a physician. Hurley said everyone should have access to high-quality care from family doctors and hospitals.

Call for funding

Hurley said hospitals need funding to be both reliable and increased.

“They need stable, multi-year funding, and they need an infusion of funds. We’re saying it’s around an extra $2 billion a year across the system in Ontario to allow the operating rooms to be working around the clock, to get the people off the surgical wait list, to clear the people off the stretchers – which, it appears, everybody agrees should be a priority.”

Doug Allan, a senior researcher with CUPE National, said Ontario continues to underfund the health sector.

“We’re less funded than any other province across Canada,” said Allan, quoting to a 2024 finding by the Canadian Institute for Health Information.

In the first half of this fiscal year, he said, Ontario hospitals had a revenue shortfall of $800 million.

“At Quinte (Health), the shortfall is $2.5 million” in the same period, he said. He later said he could not reveal his source on the record. The union also stated Quinte Health, in the first half of the fiscal year, which ends March 31, operated at 89 per cent capacity; Ontario’s recommended capacity is 85 per cent.

Analysis by CUPE found Quinte Health would need 357 more beds “to achieve safe occupancy levels,” a CUPE document stated. The capacity and financial statistics could not be verified independently by press time.

Quinte Health declines comment

Quinte Health communications manager Catherine Walker declined to verify the statistics.

“Quinte Health is not involved in this union advocacy campaign and will not be providing comment, including on the figures cited by the union,” Walker wrote via e-mail.

“While we do not have CUPE employees at Quinte Health, we remain committed to working collaboratively with our union partners to navigate the current health care environment.”

The hospitals’ president and chief executive officer, Stacey Daub, said Jan. 28 that capacity is an ongoing problem. She said some spaces, including offices, were converted to patient-care areas during a recent surge in demand. She said the surge had since subsided somewhat and those areas were no longer in use.

Daub and her staff have declined repeated requests in recent months to release information on Quinte Health’s current financial performance in relation to its roughly $320-million budget. Daub said late last year the information will be released at the annual general meeting in June. Quinte Health ended its last fiscal year with a $6.6-million deficit.

Hallway care increases

Researcher Allan said the Doug Ford government’s promise during the 2018 election campaign to end “hallway healthcare” has led to “utter failure.”

At the time, said Allan, there were an average of 826 people per day waiting in hallways for care.

By January 2024, that had climbed to 1,860. Those numbers were revealed in a September report by The Trillium, a news website covering Ontario politics, which obtained the data through a Freedom of Information request to the province.

“That’s part of this whole overall crisis of no family doctors, hallway health care, and a lack of capacity in our long-term care to move patients out of the hospitals and deal with them in other areas,” Allan said.

The same data showed an increase in Quinte Health hallway patients: from an average of 6.4 hallway patients in June 2018 to 9.7 in January 2024.

The Ontario Council of Hospital Unions calls for faster creation of long-term care beds and greater emphasis on recruitment and retention of health care professionals, from personal support workers to doctors.

Its president suggested income support to encourage people to take courses and to practise locally.

Quinte Labour Council president Margaret Bourgoin, a member of SEIU Healthcare, was present for Tuesday’s news conference, as were Bay of Quinte NDP candidate Amanda Robertson, and campaign staffer Franky Hyde. Hurley said his council has not endorsed any candidate.

Bourgoin said she has heard from SEIU members at Quinte Health.

“The main challenges are the staffing issues, because they’re being overworked,” she said, adding a lack of staffing stresses those who continue to work.