A CBC News analysis of hospital financial statements reveals about half the hospitals in eastern Ontario have struggled with their bottom line over the past three years, with some paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest on bank debts.
It’s a situation that advocates, experts and hospital officials worry may continue, despite the funding boosts announced in Ontario’s latest budget.
“The hospitals are not financially healthy,” said Natalie Mehra, executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition, which advocates for improved health care.
“It’s very destabilizing for the hospitals to be operating in the red.”
Amid widespread family doctor shortages and ER closures in recent years, Ontario hospitals have been sounding the alarm over a structural funding deficit.
CBC News reviewed the past three years of financial statements for 23 eastern Ontario hospital corporations.
The analysis of the hospital data compared their total revenues against their expenses, factoring in realities like recent retroactive payments from the province and costs for aging infrastructure and equipment.
That led to data on each facility’s bottom line, showing whether each hospital was in a financial surplus or deficit at the end of each fiscal year.
The results reveal about half the hospital corporations in the region recorded deficits for the past two years, and a majority reported deficits in 2022-23 fiscal year.
Eight were in the red all three years.
Some hospitals carried millions in high-interest private bank debt and paid tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest payments during that period.
“It’s very significant to routinely have half or more of the hospitals in the region in deficit,” said Mehra, who reviewed the data, adding that digging into short-term bank loans is “not an appropriate way to run a hospital system.”
“The public is paying for the interest on that money, rather than just funding the hospitals.”
In March, Ontario’s budget allocated an additional $1.1 billion for hospitals over this upcoming year, a funding boost the government says will help deliver high-quality care and make the system more efficient.
But that’s significantly short of what both the Ontario Hospital Association and Ontario’s independent fiscal watchdog estimate the overburdened sector needs.
The government is also investing about $64 billion over the next decade in health infrastructure.
“This investment is still something,” said Mehdi Ammi, professor of health economics and policy at Carleton University.
But the problem lies with the lack of base funding hospitals get, Ammi said, along with reactive “one-time injections” of money.
“I don’t want to be depressing, but I’m not very hopeful that this extra amount of money is going to be sufficient to make a big difference,” he said. “This is not the right mechanism to use if you want to address what is a structural problem.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by some hospitals in the region.
Mississippi River Health Alliance, which represents Carleton Place & District Memorial Hospital (which reported three years of deficits), told CBC the recent boost is welcome but “does not fully address the growing gap between hospital funding and the cost of delivering care.”
“Addressing that gap immediately is critical to ensuring the short and long-term stability for hospitals across Ontario,” wrote the alliance’s president Brad Harrington in a statement.
The province expects hospitals to balance their operating budgets, which accounts for spending on areas like staff and supplies.
When looking strictly at those budgets, some hospitals like CHEO and Montfort appear to be financially healthy, reporting balanced books or even operating surpluses in the past few years.
But CBC’s analysis of the bottom line looks further, factoring in the total margins — including interest on loans, amortization costs like wear and tear of buildings or depreciation of equipment — that could leave some of those very hospitals in the red.
The Ministry of Health recently tasked struggling hospitals to come up with a three-year plan to balance their budgets, an exercise that would mean balancing their total margins including amortization by 2028, according to hospitals like Montfort.
“We remain cautious. It does not always pay to be a high-performing hospital,” said Montfort CEO Dominic Giroux in a statement to CBC, about the 2026 budget’s funding boost.
While “pleased” by the increase, Giroux noted Montfort received “not a single penny” from an Ontario hospital investment in December. Nor did it get any money from a similar investment in 2020-21, he said.
“This is not motivating for our teams, who are demonstrating fiscal courage,” Giroux wrote.
For the upcoming fiscal year, Giroux said Montfort is forecasting a deficit but it aims to return to a balanced operating budget the following year.
But for institutions like Perth and Smiths Falls District Hospital, the situation looks vastly different.
The hospital had deficits for four years straight and its liabilities exceeded its assets by $12.9 million. According to its 2025 financial statement, it intends to rely on bank financing in the short-term and other cost-cutting measures.
While many hospitals have long-term investment borrowing, the financial statements of eastern Ontario’s hospitals show a handful of them are reporting “bank indebtedness” — essentially a reliance on high-interest, short-term loans.
Perth’s hospital had $5.8 million in bank indebtedness. It also paid $372,000 in interest over the last three fiscal years.
That kind of reliance on banks isn’t normal, Ammi said.
“What you should not see is a hospital borrowing money like … you do on your credit card, just to essentially pay some emergency expenditure,” Ammi said.
“That’s actually kind of worrisome.”
In a statement to CBC, Perth and Smiths Falls hospital CEO Michael Cohen reiterated that the hospital faces “significant financial pressures” driven by staffing, supply and infrastructure costs while serving an aging rural population.
“Our financial challenges reflect these broader system challenges,” Cohen wrote, adding any increase in hospital funding from the province is welcome.
Other corporations in eastern Ontario reported similar circumstances:
“They should not take on short-term debt to operate,” reiterated Ammi. “Having to use this kind of Band-Aid fix … that’s not promising for the future.”
The province needs “certainty from hospitals that they are able to plan for long-term stability to ensure communities across the province can access high quality care,” wrote Ema Popovic, a spokesperson for Health Minster Sylvia Jones, in a statement to CBC.
It’s not just the hospital sector facing a “funding crunch,” said Ivy Bourgeault, a University of Ottawa sociology professor who looks at health policy and leads the Canadian Health Workforce Network.
That crunch is affecting all sectors — including primary, long-term and home care — and it can clog up hospitals if it’s not properly addressed.
“[We need] funding dedicated in a really mindful way,” Bourgeault said.
“But [we] also [need to] be investing upstream to prevent an exacerbation of the crises that we are seeing in the hospital sector.”
