Ontario is making progress in connecting its residents with primary care services, with more than half a million additional people attached to a health care setting since January, 2025, the province reported on Monday.
The numbers were released two years after the provincial government appointed former federal health minister Jane Philpott to lead a drive to improve access to family doctors and other primary care providers.
There has been a net increase of 511,000 people connected to primary care since January, 2025, when the government launched its Primary Care Action Plan.
A total of 14,259,000 Ontarians, or 88.7 per cent of the population, now have a primary care provider, the province reported.
Officials wouldn’t confirm how many people are still without a doctor, but a calculation from the latest numbers shows that 1.8 million Ontarians remain without a health care provider.
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The government said it has cleared 470,000 names from the HealthCare Connect list, although there are still more than 24,000 registrants who have waited more than six months for a referral.
“I am incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made,” Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones said at a press conference.
Dr. Philpott said the province is on pace to meet its goal to connect every Ontarian to primary care by 2029.
Adil Shamji, health critic for the Ontario Liberals and a physician, cautioned that the improved numbers don’t reflect factors such as retiring doctors, population increase or the difficulties in retaining health care professionals.
“It’s great to finally see some action getting taken on this and some attention being paid to this issue, but a lot of the announcements today, I just don’t find credible,” he said.
Dr. Shamji said Ministry of Health data indicate that more than 2,100 Ontario family doctors with three million patients are over 60, and could be expected to retire in coming years.
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The Ontario Medical Association released the results of an online survey last December, showing that half of the province’s doctors are planning to retire or considering that option in the next five years.
“This government prioritizes health care recruitment, but not health care worker retention, and so I am very concerned that this government will not be able to deliver on the promises that it is making,” Dr. Shamji said.
Dr. Philpott said the new 88.7-per-cent access rate cannot be compared to metrics from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, which tracks countrywide medical data. The institute’s numbers show that in 2024, Ontario was the province with the highest proportion of adults with a primary care provider, at 88.5 per cent.
The institute’s number is based on a survey sample, Dr. Philpott said, whereas Ontario’s Ministry of Health has developed a more accurate methodology in the last two years. “We can actually tell almost down to a person who is and isn’t connected to ongoing primary care rather than a survey sample,” she said.
Most of Ontario’s newly attached patients were put in touch with a family doctor, though in a minority of cases, the connection could have been made with a community health centre, an Indigenous primary health care organization, or a clinic led by nurse practitioners
When the province first launched the Primary Care Action Plan in January, 2025, it said it intended to connect approximately two million more people to primary care.
The province historically already had among the highest attachment rates in the country.
In Quebec, former premier François Legault pledged in 2018 that every Quebecker would have a family doctor. In British Columbia, outgoing Premier David Eby, whose NDP government was defeated on Saturday, promised that every resident who wanted a family doctor or nurse practitioner would be connected by the end of 2025.
Neither premier was successful: Primary care access in both provinces remained under 80 per cent, as per the most recent estimates available.