Like many pet owners, Sandra Savage and her husband, Christopher, make a series of stops on the five-hour drive between their home in Cambridge, Ont., and their water-access cottage near Port Loring to exercise their three dogs. During a break on the drive last spring, Rebel, a seven-year-old German shepherd-Great Dane mix, suddenly “yelped, stopped, and dropped,” says Sandra. “He tried to get back up, but his back end would not cooperate.”
They chose to keep going. They were only 20 minutes from the resort where they park their vehicle and embark on a 15-minute boat ride. “We thought, Let’s see if we can ice it, rest it, and maybe he will snap out of it,” says Sandra. “He did not.”
She dealt with a pet medical issue two years earlier, when Bella, a Lab-cross, received a nasty laceration when she jumped out of the vehicle and landed on a sharp stick on the drive to the cottage. That time, she was grateful when a veterinary clinic in North Bay, Ont., just over an hour away, added Bella to their roster and scheduled a same-day appointment to treat the wound. So, when Rebel was hurt, Sandra called the same clinic, assuming they would be willing to look at Rebel’s injury. But their account had been closed because it had been inactive for two years. “They told us we had to call a toll-free number and speak to a triage group called Smart Vet,” says Sandra.
Christopher called Smart Vet (now called Vet Wise) while Sandra tried vet clinics in Sudbury, North Bay, Parry Sound, and Gravenhurst. She estimates that she made 35 calls. “They all said the same thing: you have to go through Smart Vet,” she says. “I was crying because I was worried about my dog, and they wouldn’t help us.”
Vet Wise is a telemedicine and tele-triage service affiliated with 457 veterinary clinics in six provinces. In non-critical situations, it facilitates video consultations with veterinarians across Canada. The vets can prescribe medications and give recommendations, as well as support in remote places where vets aren’t available. In more critical instances, patients are prioritized at local clinics (provided that space is available), or they can be referred to regional veterinary emergency hospitals.
But the service doesn’t come cheap. Sandra recoiled but accepted the $130 fee for a virtual appointment. She was disillusioned when the vet analyzed Rebel’s injury by video and then offered a same-day referral to the nearest 24-hour emergency hospital, in Barrie—a facility 250 km away—with a cost of $700. “That was just to walk through the door!” says Sandra. “It was like, ‘You won’t pay the money, we don’t care.’ I was dumbstruck. So we packed up and went home.”
A series of events have radically altered access to veterinary medicine, especially in northern and remote communities. The Covid-19 pet population boom increased pressure on a profession that’s always suffered from low numbers and low retention rates for veterinary doctors and technicians alike. “The situation was putting a lot of strain on the mental and physical wellbeing of vets, and it became difficult to properly staff after-hours and emergency care facilities,” says Sharon Quinn, a veterinarian in Burlington, Ont., and the CEO of Vet Wise. This compounded a chronic staffing challenge in northern communities and rural settings, which mimics a similar crisis in human healthcare. At the same time, veterinary colleges have not increased enrollment in decades. “Shortages are something we’ve known were going to happen,” Quinn adds. “Unfortunately, the profession has been slow to respond.”
Overall, prices for veterinary services have increased for multiple reasons, including but not limited to staff shortages, supply chain disruptions for medicines and vaccines, inflation, and the recent trend of large corporations buying up smaller clinics. For example, in 2020, the typical cost of a basic checkup was about $95, compared to $129 today. This has placed “tremendous strain on the pet-owning public,” says Quinn, causing a “lash back at the profession” and perpetuating the burnout problem. Not One More Vet, a mental health advocacy non-profit, says that one in six veterinarians consider suicide during their career.
In Ontario and some other provinces, after-hours veterinary services—either in the form of a dedicated emergency hospital, a rotating on-call calendar for clinics in smaller communities, or veterinary telemedicine in remote areas—are mandated by provincial regulations. But in particularly under-serviced places, such as Thunder Bay, clinics simply don’t have the personnel to deal with every call. “These are vets who already work full-time during the week and are on call after-hours as well,” says Quinn. “The case load is too high for them to reasonably manage every single patient while maintaining any kind of work-life balance.”
Quinn says that similar shortages exist across central and Northern Ontario, which may eventually be alleviated by a new partnership between Lakehead University and the Ontario Veterinary College to develop a new campus in Thunder Bay.
Quinn started investigating telemedicine as a solution in 2017. Smart Vet was piloted in late 2020 and 2021 in Ontario; the goal was to support an animal hospital in a small town in the northwestern part of the province near the Manitoba border. There, vet shortages were forcing local pet owners to travel two to three hours as far as Winnipeg clinics, and a beleaguered urban emergency hospital, where patients routinely faced 24- to 36-hour wait times.
“We found that more than 70 per cent of patients seeking care after-hours could be managed remotely until their regular vet was available to see them,” she says.
The service expanded rapidly, particularly in Northern Ontario. Calls are triaged based on severity. If there’s a critical need for immediate care, “We arrange that care for the client and their pet with the closest provider who can accept them,” says Quinn. “We communicate with the veterinarian, send a transfer form with the pertinent information, and get the client on the road to care.” Sudbury veterinarian Derek Laporte, whose clinic has used Vet Wise since August 2022, says telemedicine “reduces the overwhelming volume of calls.”
“In the clinic, it allows us to treat the pets that truly need in-person care, focusing our services in a much more meaningful manner,” says Laporte. “It actually saves money for pet owners in cases that don’t need to be treated in-person by avoiding after-hours emergency fees.”
Back in Cambridge, Rebel’s regular vet treated him for a ruptured cruciate ligament. And happily, by mid-summer, Sandra’s gentle giant was fully healed and once again up at the cottage. But the experience changed Sandra’s outlook. She now packs a dog first aid kit and worries more. “It’s sobering,” she says. “Do we stop taking the family pets to the cottage because there’s no medical back-up?”
As well as being a long-time dog owner, Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.,-based writer and outdoor educator Conor Mihell is a regular Cottage Life contributor. His current dog, Wavey, a husky-mix, is a two-year-old rescue pup from James Bay.
This story originally appeared in our Spring ’26 issue.
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