The elimination of historical long-term care reports from the public record comes at a time when Ontario Premier Doug Ford is already facing criticism for withholding information the public has a right to know, including through unprecedented changes to freedom of information laws and by systemically ignoring requests for comment in the media. The change to long-term care inspection disclosures, in particular, is the result of omnibus Bill 46, the Protect Ontario by Cutting Red Tape Act, passed in December 2025. It stipulates that only three years of long-term care inspection reports need to now be available to the public at any time, meaning that next year, the Ministry could remove reports from 2023, and so forth.

But it’s unclear what red tape is being reduced with the removal of historical reports from the website, considering there is no apparent additional bureaucratic effort required to simply keep the reports on the site long-term. In fact, the ministry has now set up a designated email inbox for people to submit requests for long-term care inspection reports that aren’t available on the site—which, arguably, could mean even more work for their staff..

To test the system, The Local requested reports from 2021 and 2022 for a particular home from the Ministry, which then failed to include two of the three inspection reports from 2021 in its response. The Local also spotted missing reports on the Ministry site from years that should be available, and occasional discrepancies between the information in the old PDF reports and the same reports on the site itself.

The Ministry of Long-Term Care and its minister Natalia Kusendova-Bashta did not respond to our requests for comment, but when the elimination of records was first announced a year ago—to widespread criticism from advocates and the public—spokesperson Mark Nesbitt told the CBC that with the three-year limit, “the government is ensuring the public has access to relevant and accurate information that reflects each long-term care home’s current performance.”

Lorna MacGregor, chair of the long-term care advocacy organization Concerned Friends, says she was on the Ministry of Long-Term Care’s website on the last morning that the historical records were available. The volunteers at Concerned Friends release an annual report card with analysis of trends within the year’s inspection reports, and say they are a vital resource for people who approach the organization wanting to learn more about the performance of a specific home. “[Now,] the situation that the homes were in [during the pandemic] will not be reflected, will be forgotten,” she says. “It’s disgusting, in a way.”

The design of the new site makes it additionally difficult to access, download, or analyze any information. Rather than choosing from a list of all the long-term care homes in the province, a visitor to the site must now type in the full or partial name of the specific home they’re searching for, and can only read the contents of the reports on the website itself, rather than as downloadable PDFs they can print and easily share with others. This creates new barriers in doing the kind of data scraping The Local did to create our Long-Term Care Tracker and rank the results of long-term care inspection reports between 2018 and 2025.

The Ministry of Long-Term Care (and before it, the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care) has long been criticized for its lack of comprehensive oversight and accountability within the sector. That task has largely been left to advocates and the concerned families of residents. Now, “if you don’t have the past reports, you can’t tell if this home has at all changed, improved, worsened,” says Vivian Stamatopoulos, professor and researcher in long-term care at Ontario Tech University, who uses the inspection reports in her own work. Without historical records, “you cannot do proper analysis of data to show how the sector as a whole is performing over time, and that is critical,” she says.

For many families who have gone through the complaints and inspections process—an often arduous, painful task that can last months or years—the inspection reports are also the only public accountability or proof of the strife a loved one has gone through in a home, and the only way to alert others to those issues. Erasing the “concerted efforts of families to get some measure of documented accountability…is such a cruel form of historical revisionism.” Stamatopolous says.

“This is a way to shield the reputations of bad actors who have a history of repeated violations and infractions with the legislation,” she adds.“If you have nothing to hide, what is the problem if your ministry reports are kept public?”