Elgin County’s ambulance service is getting a 4 percent raise from the province this year, and the company that runs it has a contract that expires in December. Both facts land on St. Thomas, which has no ambulance service of its own. Elgin-St. Thomas EMS answers 911 calls in the city and the county alike, from a headquarters at 125 Edward Street.
The money first. MPP Rob Flack’s office announced on September 1st that Ontario will put $6,992,286 into land ambulance service in Elgin this year, up 4 percent from last year. Middlesex County is getting more on both counts: $36,917,169, up 10 percent, plus $1,283,040 from the province’s Dedicated Offload Nurses Program, which pays hospitals to hire nurses and other staff who take patients off paramedics’ hands so ambulances can get back on the road. The release lists no offload-nurse money for Elgin.
Deputy Premier and Health Minister Sylvia Jones tied the funding to shorter waits at hospital doors. “With provincial ambulance offload times declining by nearly 70% since 2022, this shows that our plan is working,” she said in the release. Flack put it in local terms: “People across Elgin and Middlesex Counties deserve to know that when they call 9-1-1, help will be there when they need it most.”
Now the contract. Elgin does not run its ambulances itself. The service is delivered by Medavie EMS Elgin Ontario, a contracted paramedic operator whose parent company also runs services in Chatham-Kent, Perth County, Lennox and Addington County and five other provinces. County council approved the current single-source deal in May 2024 to run from January 1st, 2024 to December 31st, 2026, with mandatory reporting rules, caps on liability and an option to extend for three more years.
That end date is now four months away, and council has already started on it. On August 11th a report called “Medavie EMS Elgin Ontario Inc. Land Ambulance Extension” went to council in closed session, under the part of the Municipal Act that covers instructions for ongoing negotiations. What council decided, if anything, has not been made public. Council meets again September 8th, and as of Thursday evening the agenda was not yet posted.
Renewals like this can get expensive. In June, Chatham-Kent council approved a $2.325 million top-up to its own Medavie contract after the company said rising wages and long-term disability costs meant it needed more to keep service running through 2029. There is no sign yet that Elgin faces the same ask, but it is the kind of cost that surfaces when a multi-year ambulance deal comes due.
The county’s own figures show a busy service. Paramedics handled 3,412 calls from April to June and 6,694 in the first half of the year. Fifty-nine percent of the April-to-June calls were dispatched as Code 4, the top “life or limb” priority, and the Edward Street and Shaw Valley stations took 69.5 percent of the calls between them. Averaged over the quarter, the service met or beat every response-time target it reports on, from the most time-critical calls to the least. In October a new Medical Priority Dispatch System is meant to sort 911 calls more precisely, so fewer get treated as emergencies when they are not.
Ambulances have been a county job since 2001, when Ontario handed the service to counties and cities and promised to pay half the approved costs. It has not always worked out that way: in 2005 the province’s Auditor General found municipalities carrying about 53 percent of the bill. Elgin’s own share this year is set in the county budget, not in this week’s release.
Sources: Office of MPP Rob Flack, “Ontario Connecting More People to Faster Emergency Care”, Elgin County, “County Council Highlights – May 14, 2024”, Elgin County, Report ADM 26-26, “Medavie EMS Elgin Ontario – Q2 2026 Operational Overview and Call Volume Update”
By Anthony Zruna · About the LocVox Newsroom
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