Dundas Manor is facing a staffing crisis as work permits for 60 international nurses and personal support workers are set to expire.

Winchester’s long-term care home is on the verge of losing 60 per cent of its front-line staff as work permits for their mostly international workforce are set to expire.

Dundas Manor is facing a “significant staffing crisis” as work permits for 60 international nurses and personal support workers will expire in the coming months and extensions to those permits are being denied.

Cholly Boland, chief executive officer of Dundas Manor and the international nurses, says that, despite months of efforts, only four international staff members have been granted extensions.

The rest have either been denied or are stuck in bureaucratic limbo as their permits approach expiration. This will leave the region’s only long-term care home severely understaffed, Boland said, and the problem will become exponentially worse in the coming months as they prepare to move into a much larger facility.

“We’re about to move into a building that’s almost twice the size of our current home. Not only do we have to hire more staff, but, if we lose these staff that we already have, it’s just going to be an absolute crisis for us,” Boland said.

Dundas Manor is the only long-term care home in North and South Dundas and it employs 160 people. About 100 of those employees work directly with patients, 60 of whom are temporary foreign workers.

Their departures will come in waves, Boland said, with some leaving as early as October and dozens more in early 2027. It will leave the nursing home in a staffing crisis that cannot be solved with domestic recruitment alone, he said.

The organization made the move to hire internationally about two years ago, when they noticed local job applications were drying up, and the problem has worsened over time.

Almost all applicants to their postings in recent years have been temporary foreign workers — out of the 67 applicants in the past few months, only three were Canadians. And since January they have only been able to retain one of the three Canadian hires.

They’re currently so desperate for staff that they are hiring candidates right now whose work permits expire in December because there are no other applicants.

“Quite simply, there are not enough Canadian applicants to fill vacant positions,” Boland said.

“Both our residents and our staff are bearing the consequences of a workforce shortage that we have been actively trying to address for years.”

It was not immediately clear why the work permits were being denied en masse. The hospital has been working with an immigration lawyer and an agency, and Boland said government officials and advisers had explained to them that an “infinitesimal” number of work permits across the country were being extended.

In its most recent Immigration Levels Plan, the federal government said it planned to reduce Canada’s temporary population, including foreign workers, to less than five per cent of the total population by the end of 2027.

Kate Grimes, the executive assistant and human resources lead at Dundas Manor, has worked as the facility’s immigration liaison and says this change has had a direct impact on the rural health care sector.

“While health care continues to receive some exemptions and priority treatment because of ongoing labour shortages, the overall immigration environment has become more restrictive than it was several years ago,” Grimes said.

“The challenge is that eligibility requirements have become more restrictive, program quotas are limited, processing times can be lengthy, and not every worker qualifies for every pathway.”

Most of the foreign employees at Dundas Manor have applied for extensions through available immigration pathways and have not been successful, she said, while others may not meet the criteria for certain programs.

Under the new plan, employers are expected to demonstrate that Canadian citizens and permanent residents are being considered first for available positions. Grimes said they supported that in principle, but they’ve struggled for years to find enough qualified local applicants.

“Many of the internationally educated staff currently working with us were hired only after positions remained vacant,” Grimes said.

Those positions will remain vacant if there is not some sort of intervention, Boland said. Residents are set to move to the expanded care home being built on the Winchester hospital property by January. When that happens, capacity will increase from 72 to 128 residents.

“There appears to be no realistic solution that does not involve temporary foreign workers or that avoids a period of significant staffing crisis where residents will receive less care than they need and deserve.”

Danielle Hickey, a spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), said they could not discuss the case due to privacy laws.

She said, however, the Temporary Foreign Worker Program was designed to be responsive to changes in the labour market when qualified Canadians or permanent residents were not available to fill job positions.

“The TFW Program is also designed as an extraordinary and temporary measure to be used to fill short term, critical labour market shortages, only when qualified Canadians and permanent residents are not able to fill job vacancies,” she said in an email.

She said work permit renewals were allowed under the program, and workers were able to apply for an extension even if they had not yet received their Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA). The LMIA is the document employers must get before being approved for a temporary foreign worker.

Boland said they went through the LMIA process when they first hired the workers, but they can’t afford to do it again. It cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it the first time, and they expected it to be a one-time measure.

“Our understanding was, by virtue of the program that got them here, and them having a work permit, it was supposed to lead to a process where, at minimum, the work permit would be renewed, but that was supposed to lead to permanent residency and potential citizenship,” he said.

“It seems absurd to lose all these people whose work permits expire and go through the trouble of potentially getting people with fresh work permits that are also going to expire.”

According to the Ontario Long Term Care Association, the problem is not unique to Winchester. Nursing homes across the province are struggling to maintain staff, and job vacancy rates have increased 13 per cent in the health care and social assistance sector in the past six years.

Also, 11,702 Ontario long-term care workers are on temporary work permits, and over half will need permit renewals in the next two years, Grimes said.

Boland said that, while the problem is widespread, it was much more acute in rural areas.

“We are facing a situation where staff burnout will increase, resident care will suffer, and our experienced long-term PSWs will be pushed beyond reasonable limits. The likely result will be increased medical leaves, early retirements, and further attrition, which will only deepen the crisis.”

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