With hospital parking costing $400 a month in the GTA, Ontario nurses are demanding reform

Hospital staff are reportedly spending hundreds of dollars a month on parking, and the Ontario Nurses’ Association is demanding that something be done. 

For ONA Vice President Angela Preocanin, monitoring the ongoing situation has brought consistent horror stories of nurses, patients and visitors doling out huge portions of their paycheques just for the luxury of parking near an Ontario hospital. 

“These parking lots are run by private companies who dictate the price, all depending on what they see as required service rates needed for maintenance costs. However, these prices have now exceeded $400 a month in most places across the GTA,” Preocanin told INsauga.com.

This monthly shakedown was not always in the purview of Ontario nurses, as the provincial administration under former Premier Kathleen Wynne ensured a price cap for hospital parking in 2016 —  a safety rail that the current Ford administration removed. 

Due to mounting frustration from nurses, the ONA drafted a letter to Sylvia Jones, the Ontario Minister of Health and Deputy Premier, this past May. 

“The letter ended up urging [the provincial government] to eliminate parking fees for staff and patients — and reminded Jones that at the end of the day — it is a funding issue. The province must fund hospitals appropriately, I mean we [Ontario] have the lowest funding per capita, sitting at 15 per cent lower than all other hospitals countrywide,” says Preocanin.

INsauga.com reached out to Sylvia Jones’s office to comment on the relationship between the ONA and the province and gain insight into potential solutions for parking costs in hospitals, if any.

“Although the Ministry of Health funds and regulates public hospitals, the Ministry does not play a direct role in the governance or management of hospitals. Public hospitals are independent corporations that are governed by their boards of directors,” a media representative for the Ontario government told INsauga.com in an email.

According to provincial representatives, this framework leaves the Ministry of Health in regulatory restraints, as hospital administrators are solely responsible for collecting revenues from parking protocols, giving them absolute authority over hospital parking costs.

This, in turn, makes the issue all the more complicated, as Preocanin indicates that, like any major facility, a significant wage disparity exists amongst staff, resulting in nurses, technicians, doctors and custodians all being impacted differently by ongoing parking fees. 

According to the Government of Canada job bank, the median salary for a nurse in Ontario is a little over $70,000, where licensed MDs make roughly $250,000 and custodial staff make $40,000. 

“We know for a fact that this is one of the things that is very important to hospital staff because, at the end of the day, everyone knows it’s not prorated,” says Preocanin.

While the ONA has been leading the charge in acquiring the province’s ear, Preocanin indicated that, luckily, other hospital unions have aligned with the same principles regarding the parking issue. 

“We are certainly all in this together, we [the ONA] just happen to be the loudest right now,” says Preocanin.

Preocanin further indicated that while the median salary for nurses falls in the middle of the Ontario pecking order, Ontario nursing staff  — as a demographic — are often saddled with expenses far beyond the confines of hospital parking lots. 

“We have a high number of single parents, a lot of fields do certainly, but in a female-dominated profession where you have a high number of single moms being the primary breadwinner, every penny counts,” says Preocanin.

Preocanin then went on to note that for male-dominated emergency professions, such as EMT workers, firefighters and police, the notion of paying for parking at one’s workplace would be absurd. 

As a result of perceived favouritism within the framework of provincial first responders, Preocanin told INsauga.com that the ONA has been monitoring what they believe is an ongoing “erosion of the public health system,” where tax-payer dollars are being misallocated and not being provided to public healthcare infrastructure. 

This theory held by the ONA also actively collides with current maneuvers by the Ford administration, as some care workers claim a private healthcare incentive is being prioritized within Ontario — one that will harm the wallets of care workers and hospital patients if it continues. 

“Healthcare should be equal across the board for everyone, there should be no other way, especially for things as simple as parking. Think about the impact the current system has on people with fixed incomes, seniors and other people who rotate in and out of hospitals frequently,” says Preocanin.

As for solutions that the ONA is looking to implement, there is very little in the way of wiggle room, as Preocanin indicated that there is only one fix, as she told INsauga.com that “there is no compromise to this, the only solution would be the absolute removal of these fees and adequate funding to public hospitals.”