Blood drawn in Canada should be processed in Canada. Life Labs intends to send your blood to the US for processing

By Pepper Parr

June 15th, 2026

BURLINGTON, ON

Try this.

Your doctor wants some blood work done.

You go to a privately operated lab to have that work done.

The past practice was that the lab did the work and sent the blood or urine samples to the processing centre and the results were sent directly to your doctor.

LifeLabs, a company that has facilities across the country, in most communities, was sold to Quest, an American multinational. Quest 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. Between 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.

Whoa!  Information about your health is being collected by a lab in  Canada and sent to the United States for processing? With the results being sent toyour doctor?

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.

On March 9, 2026, LifeLabs/Quest informed “external laboratories” that reference laboratory tests will be transitioned to Quest Diagnostics. What they call “external laboratories” are Ontario’s public hospital medical laboratories that have been routinely used for many years by LifeLabs to test samples from Ontario patients that LifeLabs did not have the ability to process.

Quest’s reference laboratories are all in the United States. Quest’s March 9 memo states that phase one of this transfer of tests to the United States will begin on April 6 with phases two and three following in the period May to July of this year.

Quest’s actions will:

• 

  The blood was drawn in Canada and should be processed in Canada. Full Stop

  reduce the protection of Ontario patients’ medical data;

• take financial resources away from hospitals;
• make Ontario’s medical laboratory processing system less efficient by removing needed volume;
• send more Ontario tax dollars to the United States, and;
• jeopardize sample quality by increasing transportation and turnaround time and by making it harder for Ontario hospital patients to access needed reference tests.

The Ontario Health Coalition maintains these actions by Quest demonstrate a lack of concern about delivering high-quality medical laboratory services in Ontario. Maximizing corporate income by bleeding income from Ontario’s health care system and patients should not be the driving force of our medical laboratory system. Quest’s contract to provide outpatient medical laboratory services in Ontario must be cancelled as soon as possible and your government must restore all outpatient lab testing to the control of local public hospitals.

Burlington MPP Natalie Pierre

Transferring the community laboratory work to the hospitals will make a more integrated health system and ensure public – and Canadian domestic — control over these vital services. It will be cheaper, provide better quality and faster care, strengthen the services within the local hospitals and increase accessibility for patients to needed health services.

The provincial government is sitting in the Legislature these days, but the local MPP Natalie Pierre is still around.  Pop a note to her office asking her if she is aware of this change and what she thinks about it?