The ballooning number of people dying while waiting for medical treatment is just one of the many symptoms of Canada’s current health-care crisis.
Surgical waitlist deaths have increased 64 percent nationwide since 2018, according to the think tank SecondStreet.org, which gathered health-care data through access-to-information requests.
The public policy think tank has also found that more than 3 million Canadians are currently on waitlists for surgery, diagnostic scans, or an appointment to see a specialist. That’s some 140,000 more than in 2022. The number could be upwards of 5.1 million, as some provinces did not report all of the requested data.
