Health care remains a top concern for many voters as they head to the polls to vote for Ontario’s next government.
Ending “hallway health care” and improving the provincial health-care system were big promises in the Progressive Conservative Party’s campaign in 2018.
How effective has the PC government been at delivering better health care for Ontarians since they came to power?
With the COVID-19 pandemic diverting many resources to the crisis, Sara Allin, associate professor of health policy at the University of Toronto, said there is a lack of data to properly assess the government’s health-care investments overall.
“That in itself is a concern, something that I would see as a sort of failure of governance, of leadership, of a system,” Allin said.
“We need to be able to show (the status of the health system) to the public and we’re not seeing that.”
With election day coming Thursday, the Star spoke with health-care experts and examined the dollars spent to get a better look at the government’s recent record in three areas: long-term care, mental health and addictions, and hospital infrastructure.
Long-term care
In 2018, the PC government promised to create 15,000 long-term-care beds in five years and 30,000 beds over 10 years, so as to reduce hospital overcrowding and wait-lists by freeing up beds taken by “alternate level of care” patients.
In the 2024 provincial budget, the province reported that $6.4 billion has been invested in long-term care since 2019. The budget added an investment of $155 million in new funds for this year. More than 18,000 beds are “open, under construction, or have approval to start construction,” while plans call for 58,000 new and upgraded beds by 2028.
When the pandemic hit, the government invested heavily in long-term-care facilities and personal support workers, with $2 billion in new funding from 2020 to 2022.
But despite these investments, the 2024 efficiency report by the Ontario Hospitals Association reported the number of alternate level of care (ALC) patients “reached a record high” in January 2024.
The Ontario Long-Term Care Association’s 2025 pre-budget submission to the government states 48,000 Ontario seniors are currently on the wait-list for long-term care, with most waiting well over a year for placement.
“Ontario’s long-term-care sector is at a critical juncture, with OLTCA member homes concerned about their ability to meet the capacity and care needs of their current and future residents,” the report states.
Mental health and addictions
Mental health and addictions is an area where the provincial government has “not kept up in terms of the cost” of services given increased need and inflation, said Canadian Mental Health Association Ontario CEO Camille Quenneville.
“We still see the impact in terms of people who since the pandemic, are sicker than they were before, the clients’ needs are greater,” she said, adding Ontario loses seven people a day to opioid overdoses, numbers she calls “alarming.”
Building on its 2018 campaign promise, the PC government announced its “Roadmap to Wellness” plan in 2020 to invest $1.9 billion over 10 years in mental health, addictions and housing supports, matched by the federal government for a total $3.8 billion.
Between 2018 and 2024, over $500 million was invested as part of “Roadmap to Wellness.” The 2024 budget pledged $396 million in new funding over three years to expand mental health and addictions recovery and treatment services.
But despite the number of funded programs, the 2024 performance audit of Ontario’s Opioid Strategy stated there has been “limited evaluation of the strategy’s impacts and outcomes.”
The Canadian Institute of Health Information also showed Ontario had no data on the median wait time for community mental health counselling between 2023 and 2024.
“We are so far behind in what the rest of the health-care system takes for granted in terms of not only ongoing stable funding, but in terms of having the metrics to be able to deliver and understand the impact of the services they’re delivering,” Quenneville said.
Hospital infrastructure
As a key part of reducing surgical backlogs and hospital wait times, the PCs announced in 2018 a $27 billion investment in hospital infrastructure over 10 years. The government has since spent over $8.8 billion on hospital infrastructure, adding over 3,500 hospital beds across the province.
In addition, during the pandemic, the PC government invested heavily in hospital repairs, beds, virtual care options and relieving hospitals’ financial pressures with roughly $7.5 billion between 2020 and 2022.
Staffing metrics and hospital workforces have increased — although not evenly across the province — through hospital efforts and government funding and policy initiatives. But Ontario Health data obtained by the Star’s Kenyon Wallace shows that between 2021-22 and October 2024, patients across Ontario spent more time in EDs compared to the previous 13 years.
The Canadian Institute of Health Information examined clinical wait times for two different surgeries and found while Ontario was behind most provinces on meeting the 48-hour benchmark for hip fracture surgeries, Ontario was leading the country on the 26-week benchmark for joint replacements.
“There’s a celebrating of a lot of the investments, but there’s not a lot of this acknowledgment of what the data are showing,” Allin said.
Allin said the provincial government needs to work alongside health-care stakeholders to implement change.
“If they’re not able to do that then these indicators will never improve.”
