Posted: June 15, 2026
Ontario Health Coalition
Dear Minister Jones,
We are writing to ask that you stop LifeLabs/Quest from sending Ontario patients laboratory specimens to Quest’s reference laboratories in the United States and restore our public hospital outpatient laboratories. As you know, in August 2024, Quest completed its acquisition of LifeLabs. Since then, Quest, an American multinational, has been attempting to cut back services to Ontario’s patients. In Sudbury, they attempted to close their laboratory processing facility entirely and have now reduced its staffing by half. From January to March, they cancelled afternoon hours at the Kenora lab collection centre. Currently, they are beginning to move lab tests that are done in Ontario’s hospitals to the United States.
For decades, these reference laboratory tests have been performed in Ontario’s hospitals. Shifting them to the United States raises serious patient privacy and specimen quality concerns, delays results, harms the efficiency and independence of Ontario’s medical laboratory system, transfers more Ontario health care dollars to the United States and reduces income to our hospitals.
Read more at the Ontario Health Coalition
