Waynes Gates
Special to Niagara Now/The Lake Report

Ontario’s healthcare system is in crisis.

In our community in Niagara-on-the-Lake — and throughout smaller, rural communities — the promise of universal, accessible medical care is collapsing under the deeply flawed priorities of Premier Doug Ford’s government.

Year after year, the Conservative government has underinvested in primary care, abandoned rural communities and advanced private clinics at the expense of our public health system. This trend must stop.

Let’s begin with primary care. More than two and a half million Ontarians remain without a family doctor.

I have worked strongly with the lord mayor and town council to get a nurse practitioner back in Niagara-on-the-Lake, which was a big win for the community.

We have also recently worked together across all levels of government to welcome much-needed investment, attaching thousands of people to community health centres.

But the reality is, these are patchwork solutions to a systemic and growing problem.

Across Ontario, family doctors are overwhelmed by red tape, and internationally trained physicians face endless barriers to being able to practice in our communities.

Meanwhile, this government shrugs and offers no meaningful reform.

As a result, far too many people are forced into crowded emergency rooms or left to suffer in silence.

The crisis hits smaller and rural communities especially hard. Dozens of rural hospitals have had unplanned emergency department closures over the past year, and residents in northern Ontario face even longer travel times and poorer health outcomes.

Accessing care should not depend on geography or the size of your community — yet under this government’s watch, hospitals and urgent care centres close while lives are put on hold.

Deepening this neglect is the government’s push toward privatization.

Hundreds of millions in public dollars have been funnelled toward private surgical clinics, encouraging procedures behind closed, for-profit doors. We are sliding toward a U.S.-style, two-tier healthcare model where wealth becomes the determining factor in who gets treated.

Private clinics take the same OHIP funding at a premium, costing taxpayers more while drawing doctors away from public hospitals.

It’s a classic bait-and-switch: the government claims this relieves surgical backlogs, but it undermines our public system and takes dollars out of publicly delivered care and puts them into private, worsening the crisis.

It wasn’t always this way. Ontario once had world-class universal care rooted in strong public investment.

Communities had full-service hospitals and urgent care centres, physicians devoted to local clinics, and people confident they’d get care in their hometown.

Today, none of that is guaranteed. Instead, cuts, understaffing, and privatization surge ahead — while residents and seniors are left waiting.

I’ve called on the government to do the right thing: invest in interdisciplinary primary-care teams, simplify administrative processes for physicians, fast-track licensing for doctors trained abroad, and restore overnight services to rural urgent care clinics.

These aren’t radical demands — they’re commonsense fixes that would improve care and save lives.

To my constituents in Niagara, we deserve better than distant promises. We deserve a healthcare system that answers the phone, opens its doors, and treats us all equally.

Since 2020, Ontario has fallen billions short of promised healthcare investments. We are at a crossroads. Will our province succumb to privatization and a fracturing two-tier system? Or, will we stand firm in our belief that health care is a right, not a privilege?

The government must reverse course: build more interdisciplinary primary-care hubs, prioritize staffing for underserved urgent care centres, stop handing taxpayer dollars to American-style for-profit clinics, and restore the public system that once defined Ontario.

Not someday. Now.

Our health depends on it.

Wayne Gates is the member of provincial parliament for the Niagara Falls–Niagara-on-the-Lake riding.