Ontario in dire need of nurses and PSWs, figures show

Ontario will need 33,200 more nurses and 50,853 more personal support workers by 2032, the government projects — figures it tried to keep secret but were obtained by The Canadian Press.

The government recently won a fight in front of the Information and Privacy Commissioner to keep those figures under wraps after denying access to them to Global News following a freedom-of-information request from the outlet.

But the same FOI office made the information available to The Canadian Press through a separate request, a situation critics say exposes the frailties and arbitrariness of the access-to-information system.

The projections of nurses and PSWs the province will need — above and beyond those currently being educated through the system — are not surprising to the unions representing workers in the healthcare system, who have been sounding the alarm for years about shortages. But it is telling that the government tried to keep the public from seeing those numbers, said Sharleen Stewart, the president of SEIU Healthcare, the largest union representing long-term-care workers.

“It’s the government that has to have the will to address it,” she said. “When they’re hiding it so that we don’t solve the problem by increasing wages and improving the conditions of work and conditions of care in the workplace, then they’re obviously not serious about solving this problem for seniors of our province.”

Global News in 2022 requested information on health human resources from the Ministry of Health’s transition binder, a document prepared to give new ministers important information.

One page of a briefing titled “Health Workforce Challenge by Numbers” showed some overall information about the recruitment and, more so, retention challenges for nurses and PSWs in particular. But the actual numbers showing estimated shortages in 2022, ’23, ’24, ’27 and ’32 were all redacted.

The government argued that releasing that information would harm the province’s financial and economic interests because unions would use the numbers to argue for higher wages.

Government documents show Ontario will need 33,200 more nurses and 50,853 more personal support workers by 2032