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FUNDING FOR CLINICS
Posted: December 11, 2025
(December 10, 2025) By: The Canadian Press with files from Doug Schmidt, Windsor Star
Windsor is in the mix as the Ford government takes the next step in its plan to expand the number of privately operated Ontario clinics offering publicly funded health care, Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced Monday.
Four centres, including one in Windsor, will start offering hip and knee replacements in the new year. The province is spending $125 million over two years to add up to 20,000 orthopedic surgeries at community clinics.
The government has already expanded the private delivery of public health care services for cataract procedures, as well as MRI and CT scans, and said that has involved 40,000 eye surgeries in the past year and tens of thousands of MRI and CT operating hours.
The expansion should ensure that 90 per cent of patients get those procedures within clinically recommended time frames, up from the current level of 80 per cent, Jones said.
Critics say the province should instead be putting that money into publicly funded hospitals, but Jones said it’s not an either/ or situation.
“What I see is an existing operation that has literally hundreds of surgical and diagnostic centres that are operating independently in our communities, where individuals, where patients have that convenience of not having to travel literally hours to get assessments, to get, in some cases, vital treatments and now, surgical (procedures),” she said at a press conference.
“When we do that, we actually preserve the capacity that we have in our acute care hospitals, and we’ll continue to make sure that our entire system is not only protected for individuals and patients who need those services, but also that we are building capacity.”
The four clinics being funded for hip and knee surgeries are Windsor Orthopedic Surgical Centre, OV Surgical Centre in Toronto, Academic Orthopedic Surgical Associates of Ottawa and Schroeder Ambulatory Centre in Richmond Hill.
Starting in 2020 at the beginning of the COVID -19 pandemic, to help with the pressure on Ontario’s hospitals, the province permitted cataract surgeries to be performed in Windsor-essex in a private clinic setting. In 2023, that was expanded to include other publicly funded and “low-risk” surgeries and procedures, including diagnostic imaging and colonoscopies and endoscopies.
At the time, the Ontario Health Coalition, a non-profit that advocates for publicly funded health care, decried the Ford government’s expansion of more health care being provided by the private sector, calling it “a fatal threat to our public health care system.”
Ontario is home to more than 900 privately operated clinics, which the government calls community surgical and diagnostic centres — mostly for diagnostic imaging.
The non-profit Schroeder Ambulatory Centre was the site of an announcement in June by Premier Doug Ford on the last expansion. In that round, the province said it was investing $155 million over two years to create 57 new centres for MRI and CT scans, as well as gastrointestinal endoscopy services.
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