EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
Just two days before the provincial election began, the Ford government announced a $1.8-billion plan to ensure that every Ontarian currently without a family doctor has one by 2029.
Now, a former member of Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford's cabinet is questioning whether that will happen.
Dr. Merrilee Fullerton, a former family physician who served as Ford's minister of long-term care during the pandemic, expressed significant skepticism about the plan in a Substack post she titled "An Election-Timed Primary Care Epiphany."
In the post, she criticized the province's record on funding family doctors going back two decades, spanning three premiers, and questioned whether Ford's latest promise — made alongside former federal Liberal cabinet minister Dr. Jane Philpott — would change things.
"While the current election-style announcement may be a legitimate attempt to demonstrate a commitment to universal publicly funded primary care, the track record of the Ontario government to fund the services of family physicians sufficiently to retain them in primary care in the community is suspect," Fullerton wrote.
"After over six years in power, would the current government have Ontarians believe that it has had a primary care epiphany, or did it just not see the family physician crisis coming? Or did it simply have other priorities?"
When The Trillium asked Ford about those comments at a campaign stop in London on Thursday, he didn't directly address them.
"I'm sure you heard the great announcement about Dr. Jane Philpott, well-renowned across the country, making the huge amount announcement, a $1.8 billion-investment to connect people to doctors," the PC Party leader said.
On Monday, Health Minister and PC candidate Sylvia Jones and Philpott unveiled "Ontario's Primary Care Action Plan," promising to provide two million Ontarians with access to primary care over the next four years by ensuring they have a family doctor or are assigned to one of the hundreds of new "primary care teams" the province is setting up across Ontario.
"This plan is ambitious, and the changes will not happen overnight," said Philpott, who the government hired in October to lead a team of experts to tackle the shortage. "But when our shared vision is realized, we will have a primary care system in the province that has never existed before."
"Every person in Ontario — every baby, every child, teenager, parent, adult, seniors — will have a family doctor or nurse practitioner when they need one and can get ongoing, comprehensive and convenient care. If you move within Ontario, you will automatically be offered a primary care team in your community, ensuring continuous access to care close to home."
The primary care teams are being embedded into the province's Ontario Health Teams, a structure for organizing local health care that the PC government began rolling out in its first mandate.
In her Substack post, Fullerton questioned if the "true cost of sustaining the proposed structure and services of more community-based primary care teams be maintained" without "fundamental reform" of the system. It's not the first time she's levelled criticism along these lines at her former government colleagues.
Last year, Fullerton slammed the PCs for their "stunning failure to plan" for the aging of the population, driven by a desire to cut costs.
"Make no mistake… it’s about the money," Fullerton wrote last February, calling the $110 million announced at that time "simply insufficient both in the short term and the long term."
At the same press conference on Thursday, Ford was asked about a campaign promise he made in 2018: to end hallway health care. The number of patients, on average, who spend the night in a hospital hallway or other unconventional space roughly doubled in Ontario from 1,000 when Ford was first elected in 2018 to 2,000 in 2024, data obtained by The Trillium shows.
Ford responded by touting his government's plans to spend $50 billion building and renovating hospitals and on efforts to recruit new doctors.
"But what we need to do... we need to protect the economy because without protecting the economy, we can't pay for health care, we can't pay for education, we can't pay for social services," Ford said. "So the number 1 priority is to protect the economy. That will protect health care, that will protect education."
The opposition parties have been hoping to make the family doctor shortage a key issue in the campaign. Bonnie Crombie launched the Ontario Liberal campaign Wednesday outside a medical campus in Barrie alongside her local candidate, former Ontario Medical Association president Rose Zacharias. Crombie said she chose Barrie as the first stop of the campaign because 55,000 area residents don’t have a family doctor. The party has also promised a plan to provide all Ontarians a family doctor by 2029, at a cost of $3.1 billion.
Meanwhile, the NDP has held up the issue as a reason not to trust Ford to take on U.S. President Donald Trump's proposed tariffs.
In this election, “People are going to be looking at the last seven years, and life in Ontario has become so unaffordable under this government, and under Doug Ford — people can't even find a family doctor," NDP Leader Marit Stiles said at a recent campaign event. "How do we expect Doug Ford to take on tariffs and fight Donald Trump when he can't even get you a family doctor?"
—With files from Alan S. Hale
