Protecting Public Services
Safe staffing, fair wages, humane working conditions, and real retention and recruitment are the foundation of a strong public health care system. Right now, that foundation is cracking.
Across Canada, public health care is in a staffing crisis. Years of underfunding, poor planning, and growing reliance on private agencies have driven health care workers to the breaking point. Patients wait longer, services are cut, and the people who provide care are pushed past their limits. We need the federal government to retain and recruit public health care workers and to rebuild trust in our public system.
Canada’s public health care system is supposed to guarantee care based on need, not ability to pay. But chronic understaffing means patients are turned away, services are reduced, and wait times grow. Health care teams are expected to do more with less, shift after shift, in an environment that is unsafe for both patients and workers.
This is not a temporary shortage. It is the result of years of neglect: an aging population, an aging workforce, underinvestment in training, and no real national plan to match staffing with need. Instead of fixing the problem, governments and employers have leaned on private clinics and for-profit staffing agencies, which pull workers out of the public system and drive costs up.
Health care workers are exhausted and burned out. They are working short, skipping breaks, taking on impossible workloads, and absorbing the emotional toll of a system in crisis. Without improving wages, working conditions, and staffing levels, more workers will leave and access to care will continue to suffer.
This is a national emergency. Fixing it will require coordinated action from the federal government, provinces and territories, employers, unions, and educators, all working together to build a sustainable, well-staffed public health care system.