2025 Ontario budget and fiscal updates

On May 15, 2025, Ontario Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy laid out the government’s budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year. OMA President Dr. Zainab Abdurrahman and CEO Kimberly Moran attended the budget speech in the legislature.

The budget, titled A Plan to Protect Ontario, is focused on rebuilding Ontario’s economy by investing in infrastructure, resource development, and boosting interprovincial trade capacity, and funding for health care. The deficit for 2025-26 is projected to reach $14.6 billion, up from the $6.6 billion projection in the 2024 fall economic statement, reflecting lower revenues due to slower economic growth stemming largely from the impact of U.S. trade policies and related uncertainty. 

Prior to the 2025 budget, we identified six urgent priorities in our Stop the Crisis solutions and called for government action in those areas. The released budget makes progress on our recommendations, including working toward fixing the crisis in primary care, with the announced investment of $300 million to expand teaching clinics, an estimated 300,000 more patients will be connected to a family doctor and primary care team as a result. The budget also provides details on hospital funding and the previously announced Learn and Stay Grant. 

While significant investments in primary care are positive steps, more work is needed to build the health-care system that Ontario deserves.

We will continue advocating for system solutions that ensure family medicine is a desirable and sustainable career, including ensuring funding keeps pace with inflation during this time of economic uncertainty.

Other system-level solutions are also needed, including reducing the burden of unnecessary administration to enable doctors to spend time caring for patients. We are committed to ongoing work with the government to tackle this issue.

How the 2025 budget aligns with our Stop the Crisis solutions

• $160 million over three years to expand the Learn and Stay Grant: Building on its announcement from October 2024, the grant will be expanded to include medical school students in the Years 2 to 4 cohorts to qualify for free tuition and books if they commit to practising comprehensive family medicine in Ontario for five years
• The government is also investing up to $300 million to build up to 17 new and expanded community-based primary care teaching clinics in communities with high rates of unattachment to primary care. This brings the government’s total investment in Ontario’s Primary Care Action Plan to $2.1 billion 

• Ontario’s Primary Care Action Plan will implement a broad series of initiatives for people in need of primary care by 2029, including the creation and expansion of over 305 additional primary care teams to connect approximately two million people to primary care. This includes investing upwards of $235 million in 2025–26 to establish and expand up to 80 additional primary care teams across the province that will connect 300,000 more people to primary care this year, and support for primary care infrastructure renewal for the expansion of eligible team-based models

• Investing up to $280 million over two years to support the expansion of Integrated Community Health Service Centres. These centres will deliver magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computerized tomograph (CT) scans, endoscopy procedures and orthopedic surgeries in the community setting