10/02/2026
Dundas Manor is facing a serious workforce challenge. Many of the internationally trained nurses and personal support workers who care for our residents could soon lose their ability to work in Canada due to expiring permits. Their contributions are invaluable, and the situation highlights the ongoing staffing challenges facing rural health care.
Article by The Ottawa Citizen:
Wi******er’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.
