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Owen Sound MRIs Sit Closed Overnight as Province Funds Private Clinics, Report Says
Posted: September 16, 2026
(September 15, 2026) By: Miranda Miller, The Owen Sound Current
Both Owen Sound MRIs close overnight. Operating rooms in Meaford, Southampton and Wiarton run part-time. What the coalition’s numbers show.
Both MRI machines at Owen Sound Regional Hospital shut down overnight on weekdays and stop scanning at 5 p.m. on weekends. The Grey Bruce Region Health Coalition obtained that schedule through a freedom-of-information request answered in December 2025, and it anchors the Grey-Bruce section of a province-wide report the Ontario Health Coalition released Tuesday.
The report, written by coalition executive director Natalie Mehra, argues that the Ford government is paying to build private MRI, endoscopy and surgical clinics while operating rooms and scanners already sitting in public hospitals go unused for lack of funding to staff them.
The Ontario Health Coalition is an advocacy organization that campaigns against health care privatization; the hospital data in the report was gathered by the coalition, its local chapters and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union’s hospital professionals division, which represents many of the technologists who run the machines.
“We made formal information requests of the hospitals across Ontario and found that the majority of Ontario’s public hospitals have operating rooms that are closed the majority of the time,” Mehra said in a statement released September 15 . “We also found significant unused MRI capacity in every single region — that is hours that the MRIs are not used to do scans for patients.”
In the same statement, Sara Labelle, chairperson of the Hospital Professionals Division of the Ontario Public Service Employees’ Union, corroborated the hospitals’ accounts of the situation and added, “Our MRI technologists know that there are people in their communities waiting six or seven months for their diagnostic imaging and they could provide more but their hospitals do not have the funding to run their MRI suites for more hours.”
What the report says about Grey-Bruce
Beyond the two Owen Sound scanners, the report lists operating room hours at three Brightshores Health System sites: Meaford runs one operating room and one cataract suite weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Southampton runs one operating room on Wednesday daytimes for outpatient general surgery and scopes; Wiarton runs one operating room on Thursdays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. for colonoscopies.
That operating room data is dated. The report sources all three to information confirmed with hospital staff by the Grey Bruce Health Coalition on Dec. 15, 2023 — nearly three years before publication. The MRI figures are more current, drawn from an FOI response dated Dec. 22, 2025.
The report does not include operating room hours for Owen Sound Regional Hospital, the largest surgical site in the region, and it contains no MRI or operating room data for Walkerton, Hanover, Kincardine, Markdale or Lion’s Head. The coalition’s own media advisory lists Walkerton among the communities covered.
The report also places Southampton and Wiarton under a heading for Grey County. Both are in Bruce County.
The coalition’s argument about money
The report draws on Financial Accountability Office expenditure data to compare two lines in the provincial budget. Actual spending on private clinics — called independent health facilities until 2024-25 and community surgical and diagnostic centres since — rose from about $56 million in 2020-21 to about $93.7 million in 2025-26, an increase of roughly 67 per cent. Over the same six years, public hospital operating spending rose from $24.27 billion to $27.45 billion, about 13 per cent.
The report notes the province budgeted far more for private clinics than it managed to spend, revising its 2025-26 plan down by $58.5 million. The coalition treats that gap as evidence the privatization has been slower than advertised.
It cites a May 2026 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report finding 55 per cent of Ontario’s 136 hospitals ran deficits in 2024-25, with hospitals in northern and western regions more likely to be in the red.
On cost per procedure, the report says the province funds public hospitals roughly $500 per cataract surgery while paying private clinics $605 and the private Don Mills Surgical Unit $1,264 for the same operation.
It anticipates the standard objection — that hospital rates exclude overhead — and answers it in a footnote arguing Ontario’s quality-based procedures pricing already folds in indirect costs. Readers should know the coalition supplied both the figures and the rebuttal.
Wait times, fees and what the peer-reviewed evidence shows
The strongest independent evidence in the report is not the coalition’s own. A 2024 study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal by Dr. Robert J. Campbell and colleagues examined 935,729 cataract operations in Ontario between January 2017 and March 2022.
After public funding for private for-profit surgical centres expanded, the rate of cataract surgery at those centres rose 22 per cent for patients in the highest income quintile and fell 8.5 per cent for those in the lowest. At public hospitals, rates fell similarly across all income groups.
The report also draws on a coalition survey conducted between Feb. 5 and March 8, 2024, in which 120 of 231 patients surveyed said private clinics charged them for services the coalition says are covered by OHIP.
That survey recruited patients who had already complained, so it measures the experience of people who came forward, not the rate of overcharging across Ontario. The coalition filed 50 of those cases as a formal complaint with the Ministry of Health in June 2025.
What the province says
The Ministry of Health’s position is on the public record. Announcing the 57 new centres on June 27, 2025, the province said it would spend $155 million over two years on 35 MRI and CT centres and 22 endoscopy centres, connecting 1.2 million people to procedures faster.
Premier Doug Ford said people would always receive care with their OHIP card. The same release said the province is adding 50 new MRI machines across 43 hospitals.
The coalition’s report gives the figure for that announcement as $155 million in two places and $157 million in its introduction. The province’s own release says $155 million.
The Grey Bruce Health Coalition, a local branch of the provincial organization, launched the report at a press conference at the Walkerton Community Centre on September 15.
Contacted late Monday, neither Health Minister Sylvia Jones nor Brightshores Health System responded to questions from Owen Sound Current by publication time Tuesday afternoon.
The full report is available to download from the Ontario Health Coalition website.
