Provincial Leaders Will "Fix" the Healthcare System They Broke
Every leader is responsible for the state of healthcare in Ontario.
On November 3, 2021, Premier Doug Ford announced that he would not force healthcare workers to get the COVID-19 vaccines due to “worries about staffing shortages in the healthcare sector.”
He was attacked by public sector unions, public health organizations, and opposition parties. He eventually did mandate the shots for workers in the long-term care (LTC) sector, but only for a few months—from December 2021 to March 2022.
But despite already achieving an 80% vaccination rate, despite the critical shortage of healthcare workers, and despite the fact that the province was expecting a surge in healthcare demand, Ford allowed hospitals to implement their own discriminatory policies.
He also allowed LTC homes to keep COVID-19 mRNA policies beyond March 2022. Some LTC facilities elected to punish their dissenting workers for another two years, only finally dropping these policies in 2024.
We do not know the exact number of healthcare workers these types of policies affected. This is because most hospitals and organizations downplayed the impact to make dissenting voices seem as fringe as possible. They often encouraged unvaccinated staff to take long-term leave and pushed many to seek employment elsewhere. Others were coerced into reluctantly taking the mRNA shots, allowing these institutions to claim that only 1–2% of staff were actually fired.
However, the damage done to the healthcare workforce went beyond losing 1–2%—it was likely closer to 5%.
A study conducted last year by researchers at York University for the Journal of Public Health and Emergency examined the broader impact of vaccine mandates in the healthcare sector. Their conclusion was that “mandated vaccination policies in Ontario have negatively affected HCWs’ well-being, patient care, and the health system’s sustainability.” The study emphasized the need for “ethics-informed policies, especially during health emergencies.”
In the past few years, I have spoken to many healthcare workers affected by these policies—many who were fired, many who reluctantly took the shots, and even those who willingly complied. The consensus among all of them is the same: the atmosphere in healthcare has worsened since the COVID-19 pandemic. Not just because of staff shortages, but because employee relations—between staff and management, as well as between colleagues—are at an all-time low.
What do you expect after a large portion of workers were forced into a health decision they now regret (even if quietly)?
What do you expect when organizations forced staff to deny patients access to loved ones and pushed them into awkward, tense confrontations over unnecessary masking policies?
What do you expect when these same organizations and unions successfully silenced their workforce, leaving no one to stand up for those who were fired?
Real Leaders Fix Healthcare...
It’s an understatement to say that I disapprove of Doug Ford and the Progressive Conservatives (PCs). But as the 2025 election campaign begins, I am disgusted to hear the same slogans being repeated yet again: "We will fix healthcare."
Come on.
These leaders are more to blame than Ford himself. They pushed hospitals and LTC homes to implement these policies, destroying morale. If any of them had been in power at the time, they would have done even more damage to the healthcare system.
In Northern Ontario, a major concern is the lack of family doctors. Yet, none of these leaders—or the local candidates running—have said a word about Dr. Patrick Phillips, who was unjustly fired for granting legitimate exemptions to patients with safety concerns about the mRNA shots.
One doctor may not seem like much in Toronto, but in Northern Ontario, it would be enormous. And there are many more cases like Phillips’.
But the problems in healthcare go beyond the thousands of workers needlessly let go or forced out of the field. Hospitals have been over capacity for years—even before COVID.
(Yet, if you pointed this out anytime between 2020 and 2022, you would have been canceled and shamed for “downplaying” how dangerous COVID was.)
We went through five years of a supposed pandemic, during which we were told that our hospitals could not handle even a small surge in respiratory illnesses.
And what has been done to fix this?
Can anyone point to a significant change in healthcare in the past five years? Can anyone name a real solution proposed by the Liberals, NDP, or Greens?
No.
I’m sorry if this post is depressing, but Ontario taxpayers are about to spend $189 million on an election where leaders will shout over each other about “fixing healthcare.”
And in four years, they will do the exact same thing.
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All the parties do what the provincial bureaucracy tells them to do. And nearly all the politicians do what the party leadership tells them in turn, Same with the federal government, the US and the EU. Politicians that buck the party line - Randy Hillier for example - get drummed out. Democracy has been dead for some time. It's just taken a while bury the corpse.
Well said, Rejean. There's no excuse for any of this, especially after it became apparent that the vaccines did not prevent transmission and that there were legitimate safety concerns.
"In Northern Ontario, a major concern is the lack of family doctors. Yet, none of these leaders—or the local candidates running—have said a word about Dr. Patrick Phillips, who was unjustly fired for granting legitimate exemptions to patients with safety concerns about the mRNA shots."
What happened to physicians like Dr. Patrick Phillips, who respected patient concerns and upheld medicine's essential principle of informed consent, is unconscionable. We need more healers like them. But instead the system churns out and rewards physicians who effectively work as the frontline for big pharma. Why is that?