ERstat is a reader-supported ER wait time tracker for Canadian hospitals. No ads. No government funding. No investors. If ERstat has helped you, you can help keep it running.
Keeps ERstat free, ad-free, and running for everyone in Canada who needs it.
Funds the work that expands ERstat to more hospitals, more provinces, and more accurate predictions.
Funds prediction research and lets ERstat operate independently for the long term.
I'm Jason, and I built ERstat from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. The site has been live since February 2026 and now covers 220+ Canadian hospitals with live data and another 400+ silent hospitals through a prediction model.
I built it because the existing options weren't good enough. Provincial wait time pages cover some hospitals in some provinces, often with delays, sometimes not at all. Five provinces publish no ER data. Most rural and northern Canadians have no way to check a wait time before they leave for the hospital. ERstat is the only place that closes those gaps.
It's free, ad-free, and will stay that way. Reader support is how it stays independent of the things that would otherwise pay for it — advertisers, governments, investors — and how I keep building it.
— Jason
Five Canadian provinces publish no ER wait data. Others publish for some hospitals but not others. ERstat's statistical model estimates wait times at 400+ silent hospitals across Canada, using calibrated prediction from similar hospitals where data does exist. It's the only public source of wait estimates for most rural and northern ERs in the country. Supporter funding keeps the research going and expands coverage.
Anyone can submit a wait time report after visiting an ER. Reports are timestamped, location-tagged, and feed back into ERstat to improve accuracy. As more Canadians contribute, the data gets closer to what's actually happening at the hospital — not just what was reported to a provincial dashboard.
ERstat takes no money from hospitals, health authorities, governments, or advertisers. That's not an accident. If any of those funded the site, you'd reasonably wonder whether the wait times you see were the real ones, or whether coverage of closures and outages was being shaped by the people being covered. Reader support is the only funding model that doesn't compromise the editorial independence the work depends on.
When Nova Scotia Health's data feed went down on May 9, 2026 during the One Person One Record rollout, the only public source still reporting NS wait times was ERstat — using prediction models trained on similar hospitals in similar provinces. That's the kind of work reader support pays for.
No. ERstat is operated by Suboptimal Development. Contributions are not tax-deductible. If charitable status matters to you, consider supporting a registered Canadian charity instead. ERstat doesn't pursue charity status because the registered-charity framework would limit what the site can say about government-run health systems — the opposite of what's useful here.
Infrastructure, ongoing development, and the work needed to expand coverage to more hospitals and more provinces. Your contribution funds the scrapers that pull provincial data every five minutes, the prediction model that fills in coverage for hospitals no one publishes, the notification systems that send closure alerts, and the development work that keeps the site improving. As ERstat grows, supporter funding lets it operate sustainably and independently rather than seeking advertising, government, or investor funding.
Yes. Recurring contributions are managed through Stripe and can be cancelled with one click from the email receipt, by signing in to manage your subscription, or by contacting hello@erstat.ca. No phone calls, no retention scripts.
An ER wait time site with display ads becomes a different kind of product. The incentive shifts from "give people accurate information fast" to "keep them on the page longer." That's bad for users in stressful situations and bad for the integrity of the data. ERstat will stay ad-free.
If you work in a Canadian ER, the free healthcare worker portal lets your team report wait times and closures directly. Sign up here. That is a different kind of contribution and equally valuable.
Selectively, and only from organizations whose interests do not conflict with public-interest reporting on ER conditions. Health-adjacent businesses (pharmacies, virtual care, insurance) would be considered case-by-case. Contact hello@erstat.ca to discuss.
No. ERstat does not sell, share, or rent any contact information. See the privacy policy for details.
Get occasional updates — new hospitals added, new provinces covered, what's being built. Roughly one email a month, no marketing, easy unsubscribe.
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No ads. No data sales. No investor pressure. No government control over what gets covered. Just a public utility for Canadian ER visibility, paid for by the people it serves.