In July, the Queensway Carleton Hospital announced that it would be cutting 101 jobs, including 87 nurses, 7 housekeepers and 4 emergency department personal care aides. The hospital is citing insufficient funding amidst rising costs of operations including drugs, salaries and supplies.
CUPE joined forces with the Ontario Nurses’ Association (ONA) and the Ontario Public Services Employees Union (OPSEU) to hold a rally on August 19th to demand that the hospital reverse the cuts.
The unions are also calling on the provincial government to increase funding in the hospital sector to address heightened staffing and capacity issues.
“Funding decisions made by our provincial government are directly responsible for the lack of beds, increased wait times, and medical errors that arise when we don’t have enough workers to meet the needs of our communities,” said Hilder Langwa, patient care aide and president of CUPE 2875, representing nearly 1,000 workers at the Queensway Carleton hospital. She noted that safe staffing ratios are a central concern for Queensway-Carleton hospital workers.
“Our members are deeply concerned about what this means for them. Will the cuts continue?” Langwa added. “These layoffs won’t just impact the livelihoods of the dedicated nurses, patient care aides and housekeepers who have lost their jobs – it will also have a huge effect on the level of care that patients receive when they need it most.”
The latest provincial data from June 2026 shows that only 17 per cent of emergency department patients at Queensway Carleton were admitted within the eight-hour target time. The average wait-time in June was 17.4 hours.
Hospitals across the province face a worsening crisis due to the Ford government’s ongoing cuts to hospital budgets and pivots to privatization, says CUPE. Deficits rose to $400 million at the end of 2025, and hospitals are cutting staff to balance their budgets. This includes over 1,300 layoffs in the past year alone, despite chronic understaffing and burnout amongst hospital workers.
“Deliberate provincial underfunding has created the conditions for these major layoffs,” said Michael Hurley, president of CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU-CUPE), which represents 46,000 health care workers across the province.
“While cost pressures grew by over 6 per cent this year, hospital funding has only increased by 3 per cent – half of what is needed just to maintain the current level of services,” he said. “Hallway medicine will intensify, waits for surgeries will lengthen and care will be degraded by these cuts – all things that this government has promised to fix. We expect them to honour their promises to the people of Ontario.
