Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones listens to questions from reporters following a news conference in Etobicoke, Ont., on Jan. 11, 2023.Tijana Martin/The Canadian Press
Ontario’s governing Progressive Conservatives unofficially kicked off their re-election bid with a promise to spend $1.8-billion to ensure every resident of the province has a family doctor or nurse practitioner, a pledge crafted to shore up the party’s vulnerability on primary health care.
Health Minister Sylvia Jones and Jane Philpott, a physician who leads the province’s primary care action team and is a former federal health minister, unveiled a plan on Monday that highlighted $400-million in previously announced funding and $1.4-billion in new money to be doled out over four years.
The plan marks the government’s first major policy announcement since Premier Doug Ford confirmed on Friday that he plans to set off a snap election this week, sending voters to the polls Feb. 27.
The Progressive Conservatives have previously promised to increase access to family doctors, but the problem has gotten worse since Mr. Ford first came to power. The number of Ontarians without a family doctor rose to 2.5 million as of September, 2023, up from 1.8 million in 2020, according to data based on Ontario Health Insurance Plan records and distributed by the Ontario College of Family Physicians.
“The best time to do this would have been years ago,” Dominik Nowak, president of the Ontario Medical Association, said of the new plan. “The next best time is now, and I see this is an important step in the right direction.”
Ontario Liberals, labour groups criticize Ford over snap election call and misusing public funds
Dr. Nowak, a family doctor at Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital, noted the severity of the primary care shortage was on full display earlier this month when hundreds of people lined up in an early morning snowfall outside a legion hall in Walkerton, a town in Bruce County, northwest of Toronto, to sign up with a new family doctor.
Despite such scenes, Ontario performs better than any other province when it comes to the share of residents with a regular health care provider, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, which draws its data from Statistics Canada surveys.
But, like other jurisdictions, Ontario faces an uphill battle against the prevailing trends. Older doctors with large practices are retiring, fewer young doctors are choosing to train as family physicians and fewer of those are willing to work full-time in traditional office-based, cradle-to-grave family practice.
Ms. Jones and Dr. Philpott, who started her new role Dec. 1, promised to create and expand 305 additional interdisciplinary teams to attach approximately two million people to primary care over the next four years.
The Progressive Conservatives say they’ve already taken steps to train and recruit doctors to fill those teams, although it will take years for some of those policies to pay off. The government is opening two new medical schools, expanding grants for medical students who commit to practise family medicine when they graduate and making it easier for internationally trained physicians to practise primary care.
Teams would accept new patients based partly on where they live in a model known as geographic attachment, Dr. Philpott said. “Ontario is embarking on a historic opportunity to build a primary care system where the guarantee of access to a primary care team is as automatic as a child being assigned to a public school in their community,” she said.
The government also vowed to introduce legislation that would set standards for what patients can expect from primary care services; publicly report on key performance metrics, such as the number of people attached to primary care teams and the percentage who can snag same-day or next-day appointments; and establish a target of no more than 12 months waiting on Health Care Connect, the provincial queue for primary care.
None of those goals will be achievable if physicians aren’t willing to work in family medicine in Ontario, said Jobin Varughese, president of the Ontario College of Family Physicians. He said he was encouraged by some aspects of the plan – including support for new digital tools and centralized referral systems – designed to lessen an administrative burden that drives some doctors out of primary care.
Those changes, “will significantly improve recruitment in my eyes because they’ll allow people to actually see that there is some hope for the future in terms of how you can do your work and actually spend more time in front of your patients,” Dr. Varughese, a family doctor in Caledon, Ont., added.
Opposition leaders at Queen’s Park portrayed Monday’s announcement as a last-ditch effort to address the doctor shortage hours before the province is plunged into an election.
“Doug Ford and the Conservatives have made the problem worse, not better, and now at the last minute, as they’re heading into another election – an early snap election – and they’re afraid, they’re starting to make more promises that they’ll never deliver on,” said Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles, who heads the Official Opposition.
Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie said she supported the hiring of Dr. Philpott and hopes the government follows her recommendations, particularly around the idea of accessing family doctors geographically. But she called Monday’s announcement “too little, too late.”
Mr. Ford has said his PC Party, which holds a commanding majority in the legislature, needs a new mandate from the public in the face of tariff threats from U.S. President Donald Trump that could cost the province 500,000 jobs.
The Premier said last week he will visit Lieutenant-Governor Edith Dumont on Tuesday to advise her to dissolve the legislature, starting the campaign the next day.
Asked Monday about the timing of the announcement, Dr. Philpott said there is nothing more important than ensuring access to primary care and praised the current government’s efforts.
Dr. Philpott added she was appointed by the Ontario public service and will continue to serve at the discretion of whichever government is in place. “There’s nothing political about the work that is going on here,” she said.
link