An independent, public-interest project — not a hospital, government body, or company.
ER Compass shows live and archived emergency-room wait times for more than 800 emergency departments across all of Canada — every province and territory — and helps you find the fastest open ER near you. It's free, carries no advertising, and doesn't sell or track you.
It's built and run by one independent Canadian developer as a public-interest project, at the maintainer's own expense. This page explains where the data comes from, how it's funded, and how to reach a real person.
Canadian hospitals and health authorities publish their current ER wait times — and then overwrite them a few minutes later, so the record disappears. ER Compass does two things with that data: it puts the live picture in one place so you can find care faster when you or someone you love is sick, and it keeps the archive nobody else keeps, so the public can see how waits actually behave over time. Open data about emergency care, kept honestly, is the whole point.
We read first-party feeds published by the hospitals and provincial health authorities themselves — never a re-seller — and we stamp every reading with the moment the hospital said it was current:
We never blend different provinces' numbers into a single fake figure, and we flag stale or frozen feeds instead of passing them off as live. Exactly how accurate the live numbers are — measured against what hospitals post next, and against CIHI's official benchmarks — is laid out on our accuracy page.
ER Compass takes no advertising, has no paywall, and does not sell, share, or monetize your data — there are no accounts and no cross-site tracking (see the privacy policy). It runs on a small server paid for by the maintainer. Because it carries health information that people rely on in a hurry, it is deliberately kept free of the conflicts of interest that come with ads or referral deals: we don't get paid to point you at one hospital, clinic, or virtual-care service over another.
ER Compass is an information tool, not a medical provider. Wait times are hospital estimates and can change without warning, and emergency rooms always see the sickest patients first — so the number you see is not a promise. In a medical emergency, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department; for non-urgent health advice, call 811. Never drive past a closer ER because a farther one shows a shorter posted wait.
The wait-time record ER Compass collects is published as open data under CC BY 4.0, so researchers, journalists, and the public can use it with attribution. Third-party context that carries its own licence (CIHI, Public Health Agency of Canada, weather) is excluded from that grant so we never re-licence someone else's data.
ER Compass is maintained by one independent Canadian developer and is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any hospital, health authority, or government. Questions, corrections, or a hospital feed we've gotten wrong? Email hello@ercompass.ca — a real person reads it. For privacy questions specifically, write privacy@ercompass.ca.
See also our accuracy & methodology, privacy policy, and terms of use.