(September 15, 2026) By: Miranda Miller, The Owen Sound Current<\/p>\n
Both Owen Sound MRIs close overnight. Operating rooms in Meaford, Southampton and Wiarton run part-time. What the coalition’s numbers show.<\/em><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s hospital professionals division, which represents many of the technologists who run the machines.<\/p>\n \u201cWe made formal information requests of the hospitals across Ontario and found that the majority of Ontario\u2019s public hospitals have operating rooms that are closed the majority of the time,\u201d Mehra said in a statement released September 15 . \u201cWe also found significant unused MRI capacity in every single region \u2014 that is hours that the MRIs are not used to do scans for patients.\u201d<\/p>\n In the same statement, Sara Labelle, chairperson of the Hospital Professionals Division of the Ontario Public Service Employees\u2019 Union, corroborated the hospitals\u2019 accounts of the situation and added, \u201cOur 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.\u201d<\/p>\n What the report says about Grey-Bruce<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 nearly three years before publication. The MRI figures are more current, drawn from an FOI response dated Dec. 22, 2025.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Head. The coalition\u2019s own media advisory lists Walkerton among the communities covered.<\/p>\n The report also places Southampton and Wiarton under a heading for Grey County. Both are in Bruce County.<\/p>\n The coalition\u2019s argument about money<\/strong><\/p>\n The report draws on Financial Accountability Office expenditure data to compare two lines in the provincial budget. Actual spending on private clinics \u2014 called independent health facilities until 2024-25 and community surgical and diagnostic centres since \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It cites a May 2026 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report finding 55 per cent of Ontario\u2019s 136 hospitals ran deficits in 2024-25, with hospitals in northern and western regions more likely to be in the red.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It anticipates the standard objection \u2014 that hospital rates exclude overhead \u2014 and answers it in a footnote arguing Ontario\u2019s quality-based procedures pricing already folds in indirect costs. Readers should know the coalition supplied both the figures and the rebuttal.<\/p>\n Wait times, fees and what the peer-reviewed evidence shows<\/p>\n The strongest independent evidence in the report is not the coalition\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n