NORTH BAY, Wednesday, November 12, 2025 – Health-care workers at North Bay Regional Health Centre (NBRHC), members of the Ontario Nurses’ Association (ONA) and CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU-CUPE), are rallying outside the hospital to protest underfunding and layoffs announced last month.   

“Health-care employers must stop balancing the books by cutting front-line care,” says ONA Provincial President Erin Ariss, RN. “Why is NBRHC cutting 12 nurses and other positions when we are in the midst of an understaffing crisis where nurses are overworked and burning out? How are patients going to get the quality care they deserve without them?” 

NBRHC workers provide specialized, acute and emergency care to hundreds of thousands of patients in northeast Ontario. Funding cuts and staff layoffs will drive up wait times, force patients to travel farther from home for specialized care and increase workloads for front-line staff. Nurses and health-care workers are fighting to defend care in North Bay and are calling on the provincial government to adequately fund public hospitals and improve staffing.  

“When you cut positions and underfund health care, you devastate access for communities,” Ariss continues. “If the Ford government wants to connect people to care, close to home, they must put the money where their mouth is.”   

ONA members and our allies will continue to fight to end the Ford government’s agenda to drain and divert much-needed funding from Ontario’s public hospitals while funneling it to private, for-profit health-care providers.  

Concludes Ariss, “To ensure high-quality and timely care, hospitals like NBRHC need to be funded and staffed adequately.” 

ONA is the union representing more than 68,000 registered nurses and health-care professionals, as well as 18,000 nursing student affiliates, providing care in hospitals, long-term care facilities, public health, the community, clinics and industry.    

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