B.C. mayor calls on Ottawa to stop rolling ER closures amid wildfires

OTTAWA — A southern Interior B.C. mayor is asking Ottawa to help keep area emergency rooms open while firefighters and thousands of evacuees contend with nearby wildfires.

Mike Goetz, mayor of Merritt, B.C., sent a formal request for help to federal Health Minister Marjorie Michel this week, with the city’s local emergency room facing its 10th scheduled temporary shutdown of the year this weekend.

Goetz is asking Michel to launch an immediate investigation into the rolling closures and potentially take over the management of local hospitals in the southern Interior.

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His municipality is currently sheltering some 300 wildfire evacuees and 150 firefighters. A wildfire outbreak last weekend forced roughly 13,000 residents to flee the nearby town of Summerland.

Goetz told local media that his community’s emergency room was an indispensable source of 24-hour medical care for first responders putting their lives on the line.

“These firefighters are working shift, they’re out there on the fire… and somebody gets hurt, well you know, now they’re making a one-hour trip to Kamloops or Kelowna,” said Goetz.

Merritt, a community of 7,000 permanent residents, is one of several small towns in the southern Interior that have been hit by intermittent emergency room closures, due primarily to a lack of available doctors and nurses.

According to data previously cited by Mayor Goetz, there were 137 emergency room closures across B.C.’s Interior in 2025, averaging one closure every 2.6 days.

Goetz said he’d lost confidence in the B.C. government’s ability to handle the situation, and criticized provincial Health Minister Josie Osborne for what he called a lack of communication about the situation.