Federal spending on healthcare spiked after the pandemic; why is Peel still suffering?

All Brampton residents have something in common. 

When they get sick or hurt and need hospital care, they have only one place to turn. 

With a single full-service hospital for a population approaching 800,000 residents, the strain on Brampton Civic, and its dedicated nurses, doctors and support staff who do life-saving work every day, is past the breaking point. 

The days of hallway healthcare warnings, code orange alarms signalling no hospital beds were available and local emergency declarations by municipal councillors seem to have faded away. The healthcare system is in full-blown crisis.

Residents have been forced to accept their reality.

Families in Brampton don’t know what Canada’s beloved universal healthcare looks or feels like. Their experience is more like something people in other countries suffer through.   

More than 80 percent of residents who walk through the door of Brampton Civic spend over eight hours in the emergency room waiting for care. Currently, the average time a patient spends before being admitted to a hospital bed is 35 hours (Ontario’s target is 8).  

Brampton Civic Hospital has been forced to use hallways and other makeshift spaces due to a severe shortage of beds.

(William Osler Health System)

In 2021 more than 5,000 patients at Civic had to be treated in a hallway or other makeshift space because not enough beds were available. Brampton has about one third the number of hospital beds per resident compared to the Ontario average.

"My own grandmother faced hallway healthcare at the hospital in Brampton over and over again when she was in long-term care ten years ago,” Janine Hermann-McLeod, Co-Chair of the Brampton-Caledon Health Coalition, previously told The Pointer. “She was left in hallways for eight to ten hours at a time with brain damage from her strokes, dementia, delirium from bladder infections, having forgotten a lot of her English and struggling to communicate very loudly or in any language but German…She was confused, scared, in pain, and it's not the kind of care she paid taxes for years to receive at the end of her life."

Brampton Councillor Pat Fortini told a similar story when in 2021, his wife was in severe pain and he had to travel to Georgetown for emergency treatment because of the long wait times in Brampton. It is “shameful” what the people of Brampton have to go through, he said at the time.

Mary McLeod, a longtime Brampton resident, previously told The Pointer of a traumatic experience in 2022 when she took her husband to Brampton Civic Hospital. 

“I thought he had a stroke, and he was made to sit in a chair for…we were probably there six or seven hours in emergency, waiting for different tests and things. They did a brain scan and determined he had a brain tumour. But even though they knew he had the brain tumour, we still had to wait a long time for him to be able to lie down…They didn’t have any beds or even any cots for him to lie down because the emergency was so full.”

The same stories have been told for decades.

“Yesterday, I had the opportunity to tour the Peel Memorial Hospital,” John Tory, leader of the opposition PC party in 2006, told the legislature inside Queen’s Park, when construction of Brampton Civic, which replaced Memorial, was finally underway but way behind schedule. 

“What I saw there was shocking to me and I think would be shocking to most people in Ontario. In that hospital, on a day that the staff said was far from the worst that it gets, the average wait time to see a doctor in the emergency room was 12 hours – 12 hours! There were 25 people in the emergency room who had been admitted to the hospital, but were lying on gurneys in the hallways or occupying examination rooms because there were no beds available for them upstairs. The nurses and doctors told me that it's not unusual for people to lie in the ER sometimes for four or five days, for babies who are there as pediatric emergency cases to spend hours at a time, long periods of time, waiting for a bed in the hospital.”

The disturbing experiences of patients and their families are well documented. An increasing number of community Reddit threads, like this, or this, contain a litany of nightmarish stories from the hospital which has been underfunded since it opened two decades ago, leaving Brampton with the lowest number of hospital beds per capita in the province. Brampton Civic has just 645 beds. This means Brampton has about 0.82 hospital beds for every 1,000 residents. This is about a third the Ontario average of 2.4 according to a report last year by the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario, an agency established under provincial legislation. The Brampton number is much closer to those seen in the developing world, and in some cases, even below per capita bed counts in under-developed nations.

Social media posts about experiences at Brampton Civic Hospital.

(Reddit)

The situation in Brampton has become more frustrating since the pandemic, as federal healthcare funding increased significantly, raising questions about why Ottawa has not tied its healthcare transfers to conditions that would force provinces to hire more nurses and doctors, while funding the required number of hospital beds in places like Brampton. 

Data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) show investment by the Government of Canada into healthcare has been increasing more sharply over the last five years, reaching $372 billion in 2024. It was a 5.7 percent increase over the prior year, and followed a 4.5 percent increase in 2023. 

(Canadian Institute for Health Information)

Federal healthcare spending is distributed to provincial and territorial governments through two main streams: the Canada Health Transfer and the Canada Social Transfer. The CHT is the main funding source that is specifically designated to support provincial and territorial healthcare. The total allocation is analyzed each December for the upcoming fiscal year and is based largely on population. Payments are made in 24 equal installments, twice a month, throughout the fiscal year. The CST stream supports social services and early childhood development. Last month, Ontario received $850.4 million through the CHT and $276 million in CST funds from the federal government. In total, Ontario received $19.2 billion through the CHT in 2024.

While Canada committed to a new agreement in 2023 with provinces and territories that will see $196.1 billion in additional health funding over the next 10 years, it remains unclear whether this will result in any change for Peel.

The Pointer reached out to candidates from both the Liberal and Conservative parties in Mississauga and Brampton and asked how they would ensure federal health transfers to Ontario reach historically underfunded regions like Peel. As of publication, only the Liberals provided a response. 

“Our commitments on healthcare include a range of investments that will positively impact Peel Region. We will add thousands of doctors and nurses to the health care system, ensure health care workers can work anywhere in Canada, and streamline credential recognition so trained physicians can start practicing,” Tahiya Bakht, a spokesperson for the Liberal Party, detailed in an email. She noted the Liberal plan also includes investments in community healthcare infrastructure including hospitals, clinics and long-term care. “We have such an ambitious plan for Canada’s public health care system because we recognize the need to address underinvestment, including in Peel Region. Our commitment to invest $4 billion in health care infrastructure, set to be cost-matched by provinces and territories, will prioritize underserved areas.”

According to Ontario PC Premier Doug Ford, he is investing more in healthcare than any other premier before him. This is true of every premier in Ontario’s history—healthcare investment increases annually as costs, population and inflation all rise— but it does not explain why Brampton residents, and others across the province, continue to suffer without adequate healthcare infrastructure.

According to the Ontario Health Coalition (OHC), the healthcare system in the province has suffered as a result of the PC push toward privatization. The OHC reported that public funding for private clinics has ballooned by 212 percent since 2023, while public hospitals face growing deficits. Ontario now has the lowest per capita hospital funding in Canada, 7.9 percent behind the national average, CIHI reported. If Ontario hospitals received funding at the same pace as other provinces, they would get $3.7 billion more annually. Funding cuts have resulted in a significant shortfall in healthcare investments, leading to serious consequences, such as:

• The need across Ontario for 16,800 additional hospital beds by 2032; the Ford government has only committed to 3,000 beds, one-fifth of what is required, according to the CUPE/OCHU 2024 healthcare report.
• Hospital bed occupancy has climbed back to 93 percent, reaching dangerously high pre-pandemic levels, according to Ontario Health data.
• The average emergency room wait time for hospital admission is now 22.4 hours, with 75 percent of patients not being admitted within the government’s target time of 8 hours, according to data from Health Quality Ontario.

According to McLeod and the Brampton-Caledon Healthcare Coalition, the two municipalities need an estimated 1,322 additional beds, the vast majority of them in Brampton. 

"We hear from a lot of people who are having trouble accessing primary care, which only worsens health and adds to the burden on our hospital system," she said.

"Another huge issue is when people without OHIP coverage cannot go to a family doctor and end up needing emergency treatment for preventative diseases."

According to 2023 figures from the Ontario College of Family Physicians, from March 2020 to March 2022, nearly 20,000 people lost their family doctors. The Ontario Medical Association reports that 2.5 million residents in the province currently do not have a family doctor and the number is projected to swell to 4.4 million by the end of next year. The OCFP reported that the most severely impacted are those living in racialized neighbourhoods.

In an interview with The Pointer, McLeod said the Brampton-Caledon Health Coalition has four demands of the next federal government which include reinforcement of Canada’s Health Act and expansion of the PharmaCare program.

"So we are asking that they uphold and enforce the Canada Health Act, which bans extra billing and user fees for patients for medically necessary physician and hospital care, including with nurse practitioners, which has been an issue lately," she explained.

"We are also asking to expand Medicare to cover safe and effective drugs. So that would be the PharmaCare program. Right now it is only covering diabetes medications and contraceptives, which is a great first step, but we have kind of some lack of commitment from a few major parties on expanding that, which was supposed to be the next step."

She continued. “There are many medically necessary drugs for lots of different people, even if you look at our current government health insurance, for those who can get it, which is provincial, for example, in my case, the Trillium program, or the ODB (Ontario Drug Benefit) that I've been on.” She said medications for women and particular ethno-racial groups who have a genetic predisposition to certain maladies also need to be protected under strengthened policies. “I personally want to make sure that everybody is getting access to all of the drugs that they need, because only having partial medication coverage is not helpful to people who have especially rare diseases.” 

McLeod highlighted other commitments the next federal government needs to make.

"We also want to make sure that dental care coverage is prioritized. Right now it's only covering people under the age of 18 and over 64.” She wants it expanded to those “over 55 years old…and then people between 18 and 55; we want to make sure that that commitment is kept and that the program isn't scrapped in the name of saving money.”

The Ontario College of Family Physicians reported that more than 430,000 residents in Peel, about a quarter of the population, will be without a family doctor by next year.

Bakht said a Liberal government would work to support the commitment made by the PC government in Ontario to connect every Ontarian to a primary care provider over the next four years. 

“Pierre Poilievre’s conservatives have no plan to protect or support Public Healthcare in Canada,” she wrote. “The only thing Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are promising is cuts. A conservative government would mean no new doctors, no investment in healthcare infrastructure, and no support for critical women’s health programs like IVF.”

According to the Conservative Party of Canada website, a government under Poilievre would establish a new national testing standard to make it easier for international doctors and nurses arriving in Canada to start working; while existing federal health transfers would be maintained. The Conservatives have provided few other details and have not put forward a fully costed healthcare funding plan for the next five years. The Party’s local candidates have not addressed how they would confront the ongoing healthcare crisis in Peel.

The Pointer's 2025 federal election coverage is partly supported by the Covering Canada: Election 2025 Fund. 

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