Ford Government's Handout of Public Funds
to Private Surgical Clinics
A Cautionary Tale
Toronto demonstration against Ford government's wrecking of public
health care,
March 16, 2026
The Ford government in Ontario is engaged in systematically wrecking the public health care system with a massive restructuring in all aspects. Since coming to power in 2018 the Ford government has cut hospital budgets, overseen the almost complete privatization of seniors' care residences, restricted wages of health care workers and opened more and more health care services to private for-profit operators, including agency staffing and private clinics for diagnostics and surgeries.
Beginning this year, four Ontario facilities are being funded by the provincial government to provide hip and knee replacements. These facilities already offer or are positioned to offer privately-paid procedures alongside publicly-funded ones. A patient's publicly-funded surgery will be done in a clinic that is aggressively marketing faster access or "enhanced" options to those who can pay.
On
December 8, 2025 the Ford government issued a news release announcing
that it was investing $125 million over two years in four new
"community surgical and diagnostic centres licensed to deliver
orthopedic surgeries." It announced that four new licences would be
issued in early 2026 to deliver
orthopedic surgeries for hip and knee replacements. The announcement
was made at OV Surgical Centre in Toronto, one of the four. The other
three licences go to Academic Orthopedic Surgical Associates of Ottawa
(AOAO), Windsor Orthopedic Surgical Centre and Schroeder Ambulatory
Centre.
The provision of public funds to private surgical clinics for hip and knee replacement surgeries follows on the Ontario government's privatization of cataract surgeries and diagnostic testing which, like the current funding for private orthopedic surgeries, was touted as the solution to wait times. People were assured that surgeries and procedures would be covered by the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP), that patients would need only their OHIP card, never a credit card, to access care.
The Ontario Health Coalition has documented the experience of Ontarians who had cataract surgery in private clinics and reports, "Patients are being lied to at the private clinics about wait times in public hospitals to convince them to pay outrageous charges. They are being told that OHIP-covered surgery has poor outcomes or is substandard to manipulate them into paying on average $3,500–$4,000 per eye at private cataract surgery clinics. They are being convinced that lenses that are not related to cataract surgery are somehow required for good outcomes for that surgery. Seniors on fixed incomes are having their savings wiped out, being forced back to work in retirement, or taking loans to pay for their surgeries." Patients in private diagnostic clinics are also "upsold," told that they should pay for consultation with a dietician in relation to a colonoscopy, for example.
Besides enriching the owners of the private clinics, public funds provided to private surgical centres are funds not provided to public hospitals and drive increased costs and longer wait times for critical treatments. Over the years, many studies have confirmed that clinics established for private profit receive substantially higher funding than that provided for the same surgeries in public hospitals. Health policy researcher Andrew Longhurst's report prepared for the Parkland Institute in Alberta entitled Operation Profit: Private Surgical Contracts Deliver Higher Costs and Longer Waits, confirmed those findings, including longer wait times for urgent surgeries such as colo-rectal cancer surgery.
"Public hospitals," Longhurst reported, "are being starved of staff and funding, while private providers receive inflated payments for the lowest complexity surgeries." The opening of private surgical centres which cherry pick the least complex cases worsens shortages of anesthesiologists and surgical nurses in the public system, increasing wait times for the more complex cases. Urgent surgeries are postponed and operating rooms sit empty.
Ongoing investigations are taking place in Alberta, revealing that higher payments to private clinics are just the tip of the iceberg. Evidence of corrupt dealings in awarding contracts to private surgical facilities has already been brought to light, despite every effort by the United Conservative Party (UCP) government of Premier Danielle Smith to cover up what it is doing. The Smith government fired the CEO of Alberta Health Services in February 2025, when she persisted in investigating conflicts of interest in procurement and fraudulent payments, such as guaranteeing payments for two-day stays when the patients had no overnight stay in private surgical facilities. The RCMP and Auditor-General both have ongoing investigations, and the former CEO is suing the UCP government. This shows how restructuring of the state opens the door wide for corruption and removes any accountability and transparency while funds mainly from the working people paid as taxes are increasingly funneled to private interests.
The Alberta government has also passed Bill 11 which legalizes private insurance through individual or employer-sponsored plans for medically necessary services. This is intended to open the floodgates for access to "user-pay" surgery in these private clinics, and for other yet to be identified health care services which might include specialist care and even family physicians. This shows the direction to greatly expand two-tier health care once private clinics are built and equipped at public expense.
As with Alberta, the Ford government's pay-the-rich schemes provide guaranteed public funds to private corporations along with the ability to market medically unnecessary products and services to patients directly, while contributing to the destruction of the public health care system.
It is up to the workers and people of Ontario and Canada as a whole to join the Quebec working people by persisting in the fight for renewal to deprive governments beholden to the oligopolies including Big Pharma, suppliers of medical equipment, digital technology and the like of their power. Empowering the people is a matter of smashing the silence on the potential and proven dangers, moral failings, and dismal consequences of propping up decision-making structures where warnings are ignored with dismal consequences. Canada requires institutions, both for accountable governance as well as those which provide health care on a modern human-centred basis, founded on the principle that health care is a right with guarantees.
This article was published in
Volume 56 Number 18 - April 13, 2026
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/TML2026/Articles/T560185.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca