A multimillion-dollar funding shortage facing hospital services in Ontario’s Niagara region will inevitably lead to staffing cuts and worsening patient care, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) warns.
The union, which represents registered practical nurses, personal-care workers and staff in various other fields in hospitals, said Wednesday that the region hasn’t escaped the financial woes hitting hospitals across the province.
“You’ve got this hallowing out” of services in Niagara, Michael Hurley, president of CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, told a news conference in Niagara Falls.
A new report, “Pushed Over the Brink: The Escalating Assault on Ontario’s Hospitals,” was released by CUPE on Tuesday in Toronto.
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According to the report, chronic underfunding by the province and increasing privatization of health-care services are contributing to a crisis at hospitals.
“Hospitals [are] burning through the cash that they need to pay … salaries, pay for drugs for inpatients … pay for medical equipment,” Hurley said at the Niagara Falls news conference. “We haven’t experienced this before. This situation is unsustainable and we need to deal with it.”
The union said provincial funding increases are barely more than half the cost increases faced by hospitals year after year, to the point where Ontario hospitals now have a collective deficit of $400 million.
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In Niagara, the union pegs the combined deficit for Niagara Health and the Hotel Dieu Shaver Health and Rehabilitation Centre at $18.7 million for the last fiscal year.
Doug Allan, senior researcher at CUPE National, said there’s a need for 55,000 full-time equivalent staff at Ontario hospitals, or about 1,441 more staff at Niagara Health and the Hotel Dieu Shaver, to match the per-capita rate of the rest of Canada.
In September 2025, the province ordered hospitals with deficits to submit stabilization plans to tackle those deficits, but the province refuses to make those public, Allan said.
“They are burying those documents. We believe the government doesn’t want the public to know because they don’t want [them] to know the extent of the cuts. The consequence of this is job cuts.”
CBC News reached out Wednesday to the province’s Health Ministry for comment on the new CUPE report and will update this story with any response.
In a news release a day earlier, the province said it’s investing about $64 billion in major health infrastructure over 10 years, with more than 50 major hospital projects adding about 3,000 new hospital beds.
This fiscal year, the province said it’s investing more than $281 million to support critical infrastructure upgrades and repairs at 126 hospitals and 67 community health-care facilities, a 9.4 per cent increase from the previous year.
The forced austerity that hospitals are facing comes as people, including aging baby boomers, are living longer than ever, but straining hospitals with multiple chronic conditions and overall longer hospital stay times, Hurley said.
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Ontario hospitals have longer wait times for procedures such as hip replacements and cataract surgery, even though the province has been increasing privatization of the latter, Allan said.
He said wage increases are actually shrinking compared to overall costs at hospitals.
Hurley said the financial strain in Niagara could erode existing capacity.
“We’re on track to close more beds and cut more staff,” he said. “The waits on stretchers, the waits for surgeries, the waits for any care are going to increase and the care itself will deteriorate.”
CUPE said Niagara’s bed capacity is running at about 101 per cent.
“That’s a stark cry for additional capacity,” said Hurley. “You don’t have enough beds.”
Allan said the government of Premier Doug Ford won power on a promise to end hallway medicine, but that thousands of patients across the province now languish on hallway beds on average each day.
The union wants the province to commit to six per cent annual funding increases just to maintain current service levels and to $5 billion more in the coming years to beef up capacity at hospitals.
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Allan stressed that the union’s findings are not a reflection of the hospitals themselves.
“We think the hospitals are doing a good job and should be recognized as among the most efficient in Canada. We’re not blaming the hospitals. The primary problem here is a government that refuses to meet the needs of the public.”
