Healthcare that's there when you need it: a family doctor, an ER that doesn't take twelve hours, and the doctor-training capacity to keep up with the people who live here.
Guarantee access to care through neighbourhood health networks and more trained doctors.
Reduce bureaucracy and use existing capacity better.
Build world-leading health innovation, life sciences, and clinical trials capacity.
Healthcare was supposed to be the thing Ontarians never had to worry about. For roughly two and a half million people in this province without a family doctor, that promise is already broken. For anyone who has spent twelve hours in an emergency room, or waited months for a scan that should take days, it is breaking in real time.
This did not happen overnight. Ontario stopped training enough doctors twenty years ago and never caught back up to its own population, while the layers of administration around the front line kept growing.
This section rebuilds care starting at the front line. It gives every Ontarian a local health network with a real way in, trains the doctors we should have started training a generation ago, puts around-the-clock urgent care alongside every emergency room, and builds the diagnostic capacity to bring the waits down. It also modernizes how the system is run, so more of each dollar reaches patients instead of paperwork. Care you can count on is not a luxury. It is the basic promise of public healthcare, and we intend to keep it.
Attach every Ontarian to a local care network, train more doctors, pair every ER with 24-hour urgent care, and build the diagnostic capacity to cut wait times in half. Make care available when it's needed, not months later.
Pay providers in ways that reward access and outcomes. Build the digital, administrative, and procurement backbones that frontline care depends on, and use existing capacity more intelligently.
Make Ontario the fastest place in North America to launch a clinical trial, scale a health technology, or commercialize medical research. Stop letting world-leading discovery happen here and get monetized elsewhere.
| Goal | Lower | Upper |
|---|---|---|
| Total — Healthcare You Can Depend On | ($3.8B) | ($4.8B) |
| No More Waiting Forever | ($3.8B) | ($6.0B) |
| Modernize Healthcare Administration | +$250M | +$2.3B |
| Lead The World In Health Innovation | ($280M) | ($1.1B) |
Net budgetary impact over the Ontario Budget 2026 baseline. Negative numbers represent net new provincial spending; positive numbers represent net savings or revenue.
Detail on how each cost or savings estimate was derived. All figures represent net budgetary impact over the Ontario Budget 2026 baseline.
| Idea | Lower | Upper | How it was estimated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Attach every Ontarian to a neighbourhood health network. | ($500M) | ($1.0B) | 2.5 million Ontarians have no family doctor. At $300-500 per newly attached patient plus intake, coordination, and digital tools, this runs $500M-$1B/yr, partly recovered through the patient-attachment savings counted in administration. |
| Train more doctors by expanding medical schools and residencies. | ($500M) | ($1.0B) | New schools cost $500M-$1.5B over ten years ($50-200M/yr); operating them adds $150-400M/yr and extra residencies $100-300M/yr, totalling $500M-$1B/yr at scale. New doctors enter practice 5 to 8 years after launch. |
| Open a direct family medicine education stream. | $0 | $0 | A curriculum change within existing medical school capacity, so no new cost. The new schools above should build these streams in from day one. |
| Pair emergency rooms with 24-hour urgent care. | ($1.0B) | ($1.5B) | About 150 hospitals have ERs. At $5-10M/yr per site for staffing, equipment, and modest construction, 24-hour urgent care at each runs $1-1.5B/yr, partly offset by reduced ER crowding and faster throughput. |
| Build rapid diagnostic centres to cut diagnostic wait times in half. | ($1.0B) | ($1.5B) | Ontario has about 150 MRI and 250 CT scanners. Doubling MRI capacity at $2-3M per machine plus operating costs, and adding regional ultrasound and bloodwork hubs, runs $1-1.5B/yr including equipment. This cuts non-urgent MRI waits now running 60 to 90 days or more. |
| Expand secure mental health and addictions treatment capacity. | ($750M) | ($1.0B) | This funds 5,000 to 8,000 new beds across detox, stabilization, residential, psychiatric, and recovery care at $100,000-200,000 per bed a year plus construction, totalling $750M-$1B/yr. It takes substantial pressure off ERs, the justice system, and shelters. |
| Expand the use of accredited independent providers under OHIP. | $0 | $0 | Independent surgical centres deliver routine procedures at 10 to 20 percent lower cost per case, though higher volume offsets the per-case savings. Quebec and BC run this at break-even or modest savings, so provincial spending is unchanged. |
| Expand pharmacy-led care for routine services. | $0 | $0 | The current pharmacy budget absorbs the modest minor-ailment prescribing fees, and the resulting drop in ER and walk-in visits means this costs nothing or saves money. |
| Make generic Ozempic universal. | $0 | $0 | Diabetes alone costs close to 1 percent of Ontario's economy, before obesity-related heart disease, kidney disease, strokes, and long-term care. At generic prices, widely available semaglutide is a prevention investment that pays for itself and likely saves money. |
| Idea | Lower | Upper | How it was estimated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Offer doctors more practice and payment models. | $0 | $0 | Changes how doctors are paid within the existing OHIP budget rather than adding to it, so no cost. More efficient practice models may yield modest savings over time. |
| Refine hospital funding to reward both throughput and complexity. | $0 | $0 | Most hospital funding is already activity- and population-based; this expands procedure-based funding where it clears backlogs. The gain comes from running existing capacity harder, so no cost. |
| Reform doctor billing to reduce overhead. | $0 | $0 | Simplifies fee codes and supports team-based care through OMA negotiations, keeping total OHIP spending flat. It reorganizes billing rather than adding cost. |
| Build a universal referral and centralized waitlist system. | ($50M) | ($50M) | A single provincial system to replace faxed referrals and hidden waitlists, costing $30-50M to build and about $50M/yr to run, with regional waitlists folded in. It saves clinician time and reduces how much wait times vary by place. |
| Deliver a universal digital health record that actually works. | ($200M) | ($200M) | Ontario already spends about $400M/yr on digital health. An added $200M/yr enforces common standards so records work across systems, manages vendors, and improves how the tools fit clinicians' day, with some funded by reprioritizing existing spending. |
| Build shared back-office services for hospitals. | +$500M | +$1.0B | Ontario hospitals spend $3-4B/yr on administration. Combining purchasing, IT, scheduling, and back-office work across 145-plus hospitals can cut 15 to 25 percent over 3 to 5 years, saving $500M-$1B/yr, in line with the UK NHS shared-services model. |
| Let clinicians practise at full scope. | $0 | $0 | A change to the rules on who can do what, within the existing health workforce, so no cost. It lets the staff Ontario already has deliver more care per dollar. |
| Strengthen preventive care incentives. | ($500M) | ($500M) | Pays doctors $50-100 per completed cycle of preventive care, plus credits for patients who stay up to date, totalling $500M/yr. The downstream savings are well documented and counted in the avoided-cost line below. |
| Upload municipal healthcare costs to the province. | $0 | $0 | The province takes on what municipalities now spend on healthcare, so total public cost is unchanged. This also appears in the Housing and Municipal section. |
| Capture the avoided-cost dividend from primary care attachment. | +$500M | +$2.0B | Attaching half of the 2.5 million unattached Ontarians saves about $400 per person a year in avoided ER visits and admissions, or $500M/yr, showing up in years 3 to 5. Attaching everyone plus broader preventive screening brings savings to $2B/yr at full scale. |
| Idea | Lower | Upper | How it was estimated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build a provincial healthcare innovation and procurement pathway. | ($250M) | ($500M) | A central unit to evaluate, buy, and scale new technologies, modelled on the UK's health technology assessment body and innovation accelerator, costing $50-100M/yr to run plus $200-400M/yr for initial bulk purchases. It cuts hospital purchasing costs over time. |
| Establish an Ontario Advanced Clinical Trials and Access Office. | ($20M) | ($50M) | A coordinating office, more ethics-review capacity, hospital integration, and patient support, costing $20-50M/yr once established. The economic upside is large as Ontario captures more of the roughly $70B global clinical trial market. |
| Expand evidence-generating access to promising therapies. | $0 | ($500M) | Cost depends on how many patients qualify and take part: near zero if industry partnerships and the federal Special Access Program cover most of it, up to $500M/yr if Ontario subsidizes access for otherwise-unfunded conditions. Outcomes are tracked throughout. |
| Build a life sciences scale-up strategy. | ($10M) | ($20M) | Funds strategy coordination and modest program spending at $10-20M/yr, with larger commitments later contingent on co-investment from federal innovation programs, private capital, and pension funds. A life sciences tax tool, like the one used in mining, is worth adding. |
| Use provincial procurement to scale proven Ontario health innovations. | $0 | $0 | Uses Ontario's existing $30-40B in health purchasing to favour Ontario-developed innovations that meet performance and price standards, rather than a direct subsidy, so no cost. |
Every dollar goes to work — with up to 75% back in tax credits.
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