The Ottawa Hospital is cutting 400 jobs. That sentence alone should be enough to stop people in their tracks, but it keeps getting buried under government talking points about record investments and long-term stability. So let’s put the talking points aside and look at what’s actually happening, because what’s happening in Ottawa’s hospitals right now is a slow-motion crisis that didn’t start this month and won’t end there either.
The Cuts in the National Capital Region
The Ottawa Hospital’s announcement on April 9 was the one that made the biggest headlines, but it wasn’t the first domino to fall in this city. Back in January, workers at the Perley and Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre were protesting 38 job cuts at the residential care home, with PSWs and other health care workers demanding better staffing levels. Then in March, Bruyère Health announced it was cutting 55 frontline positions, including 46 personal support workers and nine nurses, framing the eliminations as a “redeployment process.”
Then came The Ottawa Hospital. Staff were informed by email that the hospital would be reducing management, non-union, support, executive, nursing and other health-care positions. The hospital currently employs 13,281 people, including 5,240 nurses. CUPE 4000, which represents approximately 4,300 health-care workers there, said the cuts would hurt patient care at a hospital already overwhelmed by high patient volumes and long wait times. Union president Robert Gauthier didn’t mince words about what this means on the ground.
By mid-April, the Ontario Nurses’ Association clarified that the cuts at The Ottawa Hospital would include more than 200 nursing positions, spanning registered nurses, clinical care leaders, nurse specialists and nurse educators across several departments.
And then there’s the Royal Ottawa. The Royal Ottawa Place long-term care home cut 14 nurses and PSWs alongside a clerical worker, with the adjoining Royal Ottawa Hospital laying off five additional workers. The union called it part of a broader wave of health care cuts across the province.
So within the span of a few months, Ottawa has lost positions at the Perley, Bruyère, the Royal Ottawa, and its largest hospital. And according to projections made before these latest announcements, the region isn’t done yet. The Ontario Council of Hospital Unions projected in February that Ottawa could lose more than 700 nursing and PSW positions by 2027-28, as part of a province-wide loss of over 9,000 health care jobs and nearly 2,400 hospital bed closures.
How Did We Get Here
The government’s explanation is that hospitals are facing financial challenges and need to plan for long-term stability. The Ministry of Health has said repeatedly that the changes won’t impact patient access. But the math behind those statements deserves a closer look.
Ontario hospitals received a $1.1 billion funding boost this year. The Ontario Hospital Association had identified the actual need at more than double that amount. Hospitals need roughly 6% annual funding increases just to maintain services at their current levels. The province gave them 4%. That 2% gap doesn’t disappear into thin air. It becomes vacant positions that stay vacant, shifts that get stretched, and eventually, layoffs.
Doug Allan, a senior researcher at CUPE, put it plainly: “Five years ago, hospitals had $2 billion in working capital. Now they have negative working capital. You can’t run a system this way.”
More than 70% of Ontario hospitals are now forecasting deficits, and some are using their reserves just to cover operating expenses. Reserves are, by definition, a one-time buffer. Once they’re gone, there’s no more cushion. What happens after that is a harder conversation.
Ontario Was Already Behind
What makes the current cuts particularly damaging is that they’re happening against a backdrop of a nursing shortage that predates this fiscal year by decades. According to the Ontario Nurses’ Association, Ontario has only 651 registered nurses per 100,000 people, the lowest ratio in the country, and a figure that is seven per cent lower than it was a decade ago.
The government would need to hire 25,000 net new registered nurses just to bring Ontario up to the national average. The province’s Financial Accountability Office projects a province-wide shortage of 33,000 nurses and PSWs by 2028.
Think about that for a moment. Ontario has held the worst nurse-to-population ratio in Canada for nine years running. That wasn’t a pandemic anomaly. It’s a structural problem that has been worsening year over year, and the current round of layoffs is being dropped right into the middle of it.
As of March 2026, the Ontario Nurses’ Association calculated that more than 700 front-line nurse and health-care worker positions had already been eliminated since January 2025, across hospitals, long-term care homes, public health units and primary care clinics. The cuts coming from The Ottawa Hospital and London Health Sciences push that number significantly higher.
The People Doing the Work Are Telling You Something
It’s worth paying attention to what the people actually inside these institutions are saying, because they’re not speaking in generalities.
Douglas Currier, the president of CUPE 4540 at Bruyère and a nurse there for 30 years, said he had never seen his colleagues so demoralized. He warned that patients will suffer consequences including higher rates of medical errors and hospital-acquired infections.
A union survey found that 67% of Bruyère staff said they would work through their breaks due to understaffing. These are people already running on empty, being told to run on less.
Workers surveyed by CUPE across hospitals implementing cuts said things like: hospitals are “no longer safe,” that lack of appropriate staffing makes it difficult to provide the care they desperately want to provide, and that cuts will cause an increase in wait times while making the workplace unsafe. These are not union talking points manufactured in an office somewhere. They are the words of the people in the rooms, watching what’s happening in real time.
The Money Is Going Somewhere
Here is the part of the story that tends to get glossed over. While public hospitals are being squeezed into deficit, the provincial government has been significantly expanding funding for private for-profit clinics.
In June 2025, Premier Ford announced $155 million over two years to create 57 new private centres for MRIs, CT scans and gastrointestinal endoscopies. That came on top of years of expanding privatization that began formally in 2023 with cataract surgeries, orthopedic procedures and diagnostics.
Documents obtained by CBC News through a freedom of information request revealed that the province was paying a for-profit clinic in Toronto more per surgery than it pays public hospitals to perform the same procedures. Senior public hospital officials who reviewed the documents described the discrepancy as “egregious.”
The Ontario Health Coalition has pointed out that public hospitals across the province have operating rooms sitting unused evenings and weekends because the government refuses to fund them, while simultaneously directing hundreds of millions to private clinics to perform the same surgeries. The clinics are taking the easy, low-complexity, profitable surgeries and leaving the more complex, higher-cost patients in the public system, which means hospitals are absorbing the hard cases while being defunded. That’s not a solution. That’s a transfer of profit.
CUPE’s Michael Hurley noted that the Ford government’s spending on self-promotional advertising would have covered the Ottawa Hospital’s entire deficit, and that the cost of the premier’s personal use of a government jet would have covered the deficit at Elizabeth Bruyere. Those comparisons are specific enough that they’re worth sitting with.
What This Means for Ottawa Residents
NDP health critic France Gélinas has been direct about where she thinks this is heading. She said she fears the government is deliberately paving the way for more privatized health care, noting that the lack of funding isn’t accidental, because if hospitals aren’t able to meet the needs of the people, the people are going to say they need something else.
That framing matters. A public system that’s chronically underfunded, visibly struggling, and cutting staff creates the conditions for a political argument that the public system doesn’t work. And then comes the pitch for something else.
For people in Ottawa and the surrounding region, the practical impact is straightforward. Fewer nurses and PSWs means longer waits, thinner coverage on each floor, more patients per staff member, and less time for the kind of attentive care that catches problems before they become emergencies. Already, approximately 2.5 million Ontarians lack access to a primary care provider, a number expected to reach 4.4 million by 2026. People without a family doctor lean harder on hospitals. Hospitals being cut can absorb less of that pressure.
It all runs in the same direction.
The government has said these cuts won’t affect patient access. The nurses on the floors of The Ottawa Hospital, Bruyère Health, and the Perley are saying the opposite. One of those groups has a financial interest in the message they’re delivering. The other one just has to live with the consequences.
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