Targets, such as opening dates for transit lines and greenhouse gas emissions, have been removed from public scrutiny, while a housing tracker the government set up a few years ago displays data from 2024.
Other information, like the number of patients being treated in hospital hallways, has also been scrapped as the government failed to meet its stated objectives, according to its own tracking.
A spokesperson for Premier Doug Ford’s office said that the examples cited by Global News in a request were still being measured.
“Nearly every data point referenced is continuously tracked and publicly available,” they wrote in a statement. “To imply the government has reduced or removed process measures is factually incorrect and misleading to your readers.”
Critics, however, have noticed some of the measures used to track government progress being pulled back — a move they believe is designed to make measuring the Progressive Conservatives’ successes and failures more complicated.
“They’ve had no plan to really address these things, and the targets expose the fact that there’s no plan,” Ontario Liberal MPP John Fraser said.
“Doug Ford’s good at the anecdotes, good at saying the things that people want to hear. He’s just not very good at actually delivering the things he says he’s gonna do.”
Darrell Bricker, Global CEO, Ipsos Public Affairs, said governments struggling to deliver their goals tend to move away from reporting on them too closely.
“Nobody wants to be held accountable for these things, and if they haven’t got a good story that relates to actually making progress on them, why create the extra barriers for themselves?” he said.
“The idea that they would be a little bit less specific in terms of how they’re going to deliver, what they’re gonna deliver and in what sort of timeframe is something that they probably regard as not really essential to communicating with Ontarians right now.”
Here’s a list of metrics that are no longer being tracked or updated in the way they had been.
Shortly after Ontario’s auditor general published a report that found the province could miss its greenhouse gas emissions targets by “an even wider margin” than previously expected, the government decided to stop reporting them altogether.
Buried in the Fall Economic Statement in November was the news that the government would be repealing sections of existing legislation which required it to establish emissions targets and report them publicly.
Legislation passed as part of the fiscal update abolished the need for the government to create targets, to report on their progress publicly or to come up with a plan to reduce emissions.
Weeks before the decision was made public, Environment Minister Todd McCarthy had said the government would attempt to hit its 2030 emissions target, without promising to achieve it.
“We are continuing to meet our commitment to at least try to meet our commitment for the 2030 target,” he told reporters. “But targets are not outcomes. We believe in achievable outcomes, not unrealistic objectives.”
A few short weeks later, Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy refused to be drawn into specifics of why the government had gone from trying to meet the target to abolishing it altogether.
“We’re leading the way in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we’re leading the country, we’re doing it in a very aggressive way,” he said. “We continue to get results as opposed to just set targets.”
Modelling completed by the government in January 2025 found Ontario would miss its 2030 emissions reduction targets by 3.5 megatonnes.
The premier’s office did not reference greenhouse gas emissions in the comments it sent to Global News.
Target opening dates for major transit projects also appear to be a thing of the past.
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Back in December 2022, if you visited the Metrolinx website, you would see the Finch West LRT was “coming in 2023.” Meanwhile, a 2019 news release announced the Hurontario LRT in Mississauga would “begin operations in Fall of 2024.”
The Finch West LRT missed its 2023 opening date, eventually launching in winter 2025. In the two years between its target date and official opening, the government and Metrolinx repeatedly refused to offer a new date, the same approach they had adopted when the Eglinton Crosstown LRT missed its launch.
More than a year after it was supposed to open, the majority of the track has not been laid on the Hurontario LRT, and the government has not assigned a new target opening date.
Both Highway 413 and the Bradford Bypass — two signature highway projects — are without opening dates or specific costings.
Most recently, Metrolinx CEO Michael Lindsay indicated the Ontario Line, which was originally set to be finished in 2027, was “still trending toward the early 2030s” to be completed. He said he couldn’t give an opening date because testing would determine when it is ready.
The premier’s office said, “transit updates are regularly published by Infrastructure Ontario.”
In 2018, as the Progressive Conservatives looked to unseat the long-serving Liberal government, hallway health care was a primary concern in emergency rooms across the province.
Shortly after taking office, the Ford government “promised to end hallway health care” by investing in thousands of new long-term care beds and adding billions in support for hospitals to ease the burden.
“One patient treated in a hallway is one patient too many,” Ford said in 2018.
According to metrics compiled by Ontario Health in its last full report, there was still an average of 1,326 patients receiving care in “unconventional spaces.”
While the health-care bureaucracy’s 2023-24 annual report stated that ending hallway medicine is a “key priority of the government,” the most recent report suggests the metric will be eliminated.
“List of measures to be retired when Accountability Agreement is updated this year: … the average number of inpatients receiving care in unconventional spaces or ER stretches per day within a given time period,” the document stated in a footnote.
Unlike previous years, the report did not list how many patients were being treated in “unconventional spaces.”
According to the premier’s office, “detailed hospital metrics are continuously monitored by Ontario Health.”
When the Progressive Conservatives swept to a second majority mandate during the 2022 election, they did so partly on a promise to build 1.5 million homes by 2031.
After hitting its targets began to look unachievable, the government modified the definition of new housing to include long-term care beds, basements and, more recently, student accommodation.
The Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing set up a tracker to demonstrate which towns and cities were on target to achieve the goals they had been set, and how close Ontario was to its annual target once long-term care beds and other data were added in.
Initially, that tracker was regularly updated and used by the government to assess which municipalities would receive additional funding.
Then, the province started to slow its updates.
Despite the data being ready to publish in February 2025, figures for the previous year weren’t made public until August.
As of publication, no data from last year had been added to the tracker, with the government site still showing targets and numbers for 2024.
The goal of 1.5 million homes is rarely proactively referenced by politicians and the finance minister even recently labelled it as a “soft target.”
The premier’s office said that “housing starts are reported in the provincial budget.”
The Ford government also appears to have changed how it compiles data on the deaths of children associated with the care network, ending aggregated roll-ups.
From 2020, Ontario began generating a summary of all children who died under the care of a children’s aid society, with an open child welfare file or whose file had been closed in the past year.
The data showed, on average, a child who had interacted with welfare within the past year died every three days. In 2023, the government reported 134 deaths associated with its care system — fatalities which could come for any reason, including accidental, medical, suspicious or suicide.
For the past two years, the government seems to have moved away from those aggregate reports. Officials deny anything substantive has changed, saying “detailed reporting is preferable to aggregated roll-ups because it allows for specific actions that prevent tragedies from occurring again.”
High-level data, however, which offered an insight into trends for one of the most vulnerable populations in the province, is no longer being measured against the same benchmark.
“No aggregate data rollups have been provided to the Deputy Minister’s or Minister’s Offices for deaths in the 2024 and 2025 calendar years,” a freedom of information official confirmed in a letter to Global News this year.
The premier’s office said the government “has always maintained its process for reporting data and investigating tragic deaths in the child welfare system.”
In late 2025, Education Minister Paul Calandra revealed the province’s latest EQAO results failed to meet the government’s expectations.
Nearly half of Ontario’s Grade 6 students are failing the provincial standards on math, prompting Calandra to acknowledge that, after seven years in power, the Ford government shoulders part of the blame.
“When I got results, it frustrated me and made me quite upset,” Calandra told reporters at Queen’s Park. “If we were doing it right, then we wouldn’t have 50 per cent of our students not meeting provincial benchmarks.”
To improve the scores, Calandra announced a new panel would review the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) testing data to determine if it was still working.
“I want them to look at the test, speak to teachers, speak to our partners … is what we’re doing working?”
The review will also assess whether EQAO tests align with what students are being taught, whether data could be used to improve policy and funding decisions and what help can be offered to students ahead of the provincial testing.
Opposition parties viewed that as an attempt to water down the test in an attempt to improve the test scores and bolster the government.