Prescott Russell had a 10 year contract with Ottawa, in which the service with the higher number of calls would compensate the other for those excess calls. That contract expired in December of 2015. The chief paramedic for Prescott Russell, Michel Chretien, says that in 2016, Prescott Russell saw a 250% hike in net calls that taxpayers in his county had to pay for, amounting to between $500,000 and $750,000, with most of those calls, he says, coming from Ottawa.
It's a growing concern for communities outside Ottawa. The Land Ambulance Act of Ontario requires that the closest ambulance to a patient must respond to a call. Many county ambulances end up in Ottawa as demand in that city grows, creating what Prescott-Russell’s mayor calls a “black hole” where their ambulances are in Ottawa, dropping off patients at the hospitals there, and constantly being re-routed into calls within that city, putting rural residents at risk.
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