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“I don’t understand how this is even negotiable. To offer Canadians their basic rights in regards to health care shouldn’t be something they even have to discuss.”

The money ensures that each hospital will receive a minimum two per cent increase across the board. It does not meet the five per cent hike — more than $800 million — that hospital officials had sought to maintain current service levels.

Hospitals would have required a two per cent increase for inflation, an additional two per cent to account for population growth and aging and one per cent for increased demand, according to Natalie Mehra, executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition.

Of all the provinces, Ontario has the fewest number of hospital beds per 1,000 people available at 2.3, while Newfoundland and Labrador tops the list with 4.6. Between 2012 and 2015, funding for operational costs was frozen and in 2016, hospitals only received a one per cent increase.

“You can’t continue to have years and year of cuts and then one year before an election put some money in and pretend everything is OK,” Mehra said.

Wait times for the beds also remain long, according to the last auditor-general report, as only 30 per cent of patients at three Ontario hospitals were transferred from the emergency room to acute-care wards in under eight hours — the target set by the province’s Ministry of Health.

Hospitals may no longer need the number of beds they had in the 1980s and 1990s, NDP health critic France Gelinas said, but “the pendulum has swung way too far” because of the lack of funding. Upon reading the budget, Gelinas was upset to see that not only would the situation not improve, it was set to worsen.