Obviously, some have had few problems using the provincial site, but here's my experience this morning, and is yet another reason why this system sucks.
I was able to find an appointment in Mississauga for next weekend. Not ideal for someone living in the Toronto Core who choses not to have a car, but better than the massive list of Barrie, Bradford, etc. that I've been seeing all week.
Despite having already searched the site dozens of times already, I still had to enter my OHIP information yet again, and postal code multiple times (seriously, Estonia's "ask once" policy kicks our ass in terms of government-data and its citizens; take note Doug Ford). There were tonnes of appointments available for Saturday of next week and the surrounding days.
Awesome. Good. An appointment almost a week earlier than the pharmacy one I got yesterday (that was subsequently cancelled by said pharmacy).
Now, to sign up my wife...
Enter all of her OHIP info, postal code multiple times... and? No available appointments at all. None. Zip. All gone.
Except they weren't. My wife was able to immediately log in on her computer and get the appointment time five minutes after mine. Plenty of appointments visible to her.
WTF?!
I could understand blocking a computer from acting as a scalping bot for successive hits in a short period of time, but in this case I was unable to make more than a single appointment within a two minute+ period. All of this even though the site clearly asks if you're booking on someone else's behalf.
It may not seem like much, but it means less tech-saavy/tech-available families are going to hit a roadblock signing up multiple users in a single household with a single device. We're told that multi-generational households are a big problem during covid times, and the provincial government has effectively set a massive speed bump in front of many of those people that'll keep them from getting appointments at the same time.
So it seems Ontariohealth.ca actually *does* set local cookies (which seem to be blocking an immediate second sign up). They just don't use those cookies to set your OHIP data, postal code, etc. so you don't need to re-enter your data every single time you visit the site. Deleting those cookies allowed me to see the available dates. Certainly not a barrier for anyone who's even moderately tech-savvy, but a barrier that might stop the average person. And it'll do little to stop fraudsters.
Maybe others have had a different experience, but I will repeat again that this rollout has been a clusterfk.