September 4th, 2025 • Volume 6 • Issue 26
Mayor Wayne Redekop
Each year, the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) holds an annual conference. Once again, this year’s conference was held in Ottawa.
Aside from plenary sessions, a variety of topical seminars, speeches from the Premier and leaders of the political opposition parties and a session in which the government ministers respond to questions from conference attendees, municipalities vie for the opportunity to meet with Ministers and Parliamentary Assistants of the various provincial government ministries. This year, Councillor Tom Lewis and I attended the conference and participated in eight meetings, far more than Fort Erie has been allocated in previous years.
By far the most important meeting was with Minister of Health, Sylvia Jones. As with all of the delegations, Minister Jones was provided with a PowerPoint slide deck in advance outlining the issues that we wished to discuss. We updated the Minister on steps that the Fort Erie administration is taking to provide our residents with access to health care. We informed her of our concerns about the summer closures of our Urgent Care Centre, our efforts to assist Niagara Health to recruit physicians for the UCCs in Fort Erie and Port Colborne and, most importantly, our proposal to re-imagine Douglas Memorial (presented to the Niagara Health Board of Trustees at the end of June this year) and how that could result in better health care for the residents of Fort Erie and all Niagara.
Douglas Memorial is a purpose-built health care facility. Niagara Health has challenges with respect to its use of acute care beds in its hospitals, very lengthy wait times in its Emergency Departments, delays encountered by ambulances and paramedics waiting to offload their patients and a ballooning annual financial deficit. These issues alone represent over $50 million in costs to our health care system or the property taxpayers of Niagara. Fort Erie has proposed a model that would locate around 70 or so alternate level of care beds at Douglas Memorial that would allow Niagara Health to free up a large portion of the 130-150 acute care beds in their hospitals occupied by non-acute care patients at any given time. The Urgent Care Center would continue operation with expanded hours. The facility would have greater diagnostic capabilities, specialist clinics, a range of health care services and the potential for training health care professionals.
This model would compliment the provincial government’s plan to ensure that eventually every resident in Ontario has a primary care physician. The reality is that primary care is not the same as urgent care. Family physicians should be able to focus on providing primary care to their patients. Doctors working in the Urgent Care Centre have a skill set that allows them to perform services for which many family physicians are not trained and to provide care for low acuity medical conditions for those who do not have a family physician or when doctors’ offices are not open.
Minister Jones was very interested in our Douglas Memorial proposal and how it can improve hospital operations in Niagara while improving health care for the residents. She asked several insightful questions relating to how the model would work, what diagnostics were currently available at Douglas Memorial, whether the model could integrate the primary care initiative that the Province is currently working on and who would operate the facility. The AMO meetings are generally confined to 15 minutes. We spent nearly twice that amount of time with Minister Jones, something that is virtually unheard of.
Following that meeting, I met with representatives of the Ontario Medical Association and discussed with them our Douglas Memorial proposal. They were equally impressed, as has every organization or professional to whom the proposal has been presented. Simply put, the model for a re-imagined Douglas Memorial makes better use of expensive acute care beds by utilizing less costly alternate level of care beds, reduces Emergency Department wait times, reduces ambulance off-load delays, results in better health care outcomes for patients and realizes better utilization of funding allocated for hospital care.
