The Issues

When there aren’t enough ambulances on the road, paramedics to staff them, or dispatchers to connect you to services, response times increase. Every minute of delay puts lives at risk.

Burnout, violence, and mental health pressures continue to drive paramedics from the sector, while services struggle to recruit more workers into the field. The result: wait times are increasing across Ontario.

Recruiting and retaining paramedics must be a priority – yet Ontario falls short by roughly 400 paramedics every year.

Data from the Ontario Association of Paramedic Chiefs tells the story. In 2023, the province needed 1,388 paramedics but hired only 997. The shortfall is most acute in Northern Ontario.

Today, more people are waiting longer for ambulances. Rising call volumes, staffing shortages, and population growth continue to strain the system in major cities, small towns, and especially rural communities and Northern Ontario.

CUPE’s Freedom of Information requests reveal that while call volumes are rising steadily, scheduled ambulance hours are not keeping pace. Ambulances are regularly taken off the road due to understaffing, as regional services struggle to recruit and retain paramedics.

The root cause is chronic underfunding by both provincial and municipal governments—compromising care for the patients who need it most.

Across the province, paramedics are facing offload delays at hospitals, undermining patient care and contributing to ambulance shortages. Offload delays refer to occasions when paramedics are stranded at hospitals, unable to transfer patients to the care of staff at the facility.

This is a direct result of the provincial government’s drastic cuts to hospital capacity over the past three decades. Currently, Ontario has the least number of hospital beds per capita across Canada, with no plans by the current Conservative government for significant expansion.

Ontario’s population has increased by about 4.5 million since 1990, and yet we have nearly 15,000 fewer hospital beds today. When compared to 38 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Ontario is only ahead of Mexico and Chile.

In the rush to free up beds, hospitals have become accustomed to discharging patients “quicker and sicker” into the community. And yet, we continue to witness overcrowded hospitals as governments take stop-gap measures instead of making investments in capacity.

Rising call volumes and short staffing are crushing paramedic workloads. Provincial and municipal governments have failed to take the necessary steps to address staff burnout.

CUPE’s membership survey revealed alarming results:

• 83% paramedic service workers said their workload is harming their physical and/or mental health

• 91% said that there isn’t enough staff to keep up with demand
• 73% said their employer is not doing enough to address their mental health

High rates of injury and burnout are making the staffing crisis worse. From 2023 to 2025, Ontario’s 13,000 paramedics filed 5,167 WSIB claims—compared to 4,161 filed by 30,000 firefighters and 2,146 by 25,000 police officers.

Paramedics file WSIB claims at 3× the rate of firefighters and 4.6× the rate of police.

Put another way: 1 in 2.5 paramedics has filed a claim, compared to 1 in 7 firefighters and 1 in 12 police officers.

When paramedics are forced off the job to recover from injury or illness, those remaining face even heavier workloads—creating a vicious cycle of overtime, missed breaks, and burnout.

Dispatchers face the same pressures: call volumes are rising without a corresponding increase in staffing, and they lack the mental health supports needed to cope with the emotional toll of the job.