Millions of Canadians don’t have a family doctor — and it’s not by accident.
Canada’s ongoing doctor shortage was the direct result of government policy decisions made decades ago. In the early 1990s, provincial governments deliberately reduced medical school enrolment and capped residencies, setting the stage for the health-care crisis Canadians face today.
Doctor shortages have reached a critical level in Canada. At last estimate, the country produces 17 new doctors per 100,000 people annually, meaning that millions of people lack access to a regular provider.
Structural factors may be contributing to the physician shortage. Residency slots are limited, some provinces have strict medical licensing requirements that include extra fees and arduous application processes, and practice eligibility requirements can become expensive. The situation is challenging for Canadians who have a passion for medicine but few options other than to seek education, residency spots, and jobs abroad.
Rarely does a day go by that Canadians are not reminded of the shortcomings of their health-care system. It’s normal to see reports of emergency room closures due to a lack of physicians, patients fleeing south or to another province to avoid lengthy delays or people leaving the ER without receiving treatment.
However, while these failures may feel normal to Canadians and might even be considered by some to be the price of universal health care, they are not normal in other universal health-care systems.
We have entered that weird space where any criticism of our healthcare system is countered with accusations of fascism.
Two decades after a watershed report on errors and unintended injuries in Canada’s hospitals shook the health-care sector, tens of thousands of Canadians continue to be harmed during a hospital stay — many of them, multiple times, new data show.
One in 17 hospitalizations in 2024-2025 — representing more than 153,000 people — resulted in someone experiencing a potentially preventable harm such as a drug error, hospital-acquired infection, a “patient accident” like a fall or radiation burn or some other incident serious enough to require treatment or a prolonged stay, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
Immigrant nurses have “mixed” results in the Canadian workforce with more than 60 percent finding employment in their field and roughly a quarter working in lower-skilled occupations or unemployed, a recent government report says.
Approximately 63 percent of immigrants who intended to work as nurses found jobs in nursing occupations in 2021, while 2 percent found jobs in other skilled health occupations, and 13 percent worked in lower-skilled health occupations, such as nurse aides, orderlies, and patient service associates, a joint study conducted by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and Statistics Canada indicates.
Last year, more than 1.2 million Canadians walked into an emergency room desperate for help, and walked out without ever being treated. That’s one in 13 patients nationwide. These people didn’t leave because their problems weren’t serious, but because the wait was simply too long.
A new report from the Montreal Economic Institute, or MEI, provides the first national snapshot of this troubling trend. Researchers obtained data directly from provincial ministries of health to track how many patients left emergency departments without being seen in 2024. The results are sobering.
Gotta give all that free healthcare to the 3rd World invaders our government ordered.
Nearly six million Canadians are currently on a health-care waitlist, surpassing levels recorded in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new report suggests.
Government data obtained by think tank SecondStreet.org indicate at least 3.7 million Canadians are waiting for surgery, a diagnostic scan, or to see a specialist. But the organization is suggesting figures from Canada’s provinces and territories may not tell the full story.
Canada is facing an epidemic that most politicians simply won’t talk about – a staggering number of patients are left untreated because they leave emergency rooms rather than endure long wait times.
A new study from the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI) shows that, out of the 16.3 million visits Canadians made to emergency rooms in 2024, nearly 8% ended with the patient simply walking out without receiving treatment.
Canadians are proud of their universal healthcare system. Politicians hold it up as proof of our compassion, while unions fight to preserve it, and judges unfailingly defend it. But pride and rhetoric can’t mask reality: Canada spends more on healthcare than almost any other country in the world and delivers some of the worst results. Our hospitals are overloaded, wait times are intolerable, and tens of thousands of patients die each year before receiving the treatment they need.
An Ontario family is calling on the provincial government to introduce legislation that would set maximum emergency room wait times for children after their teenage son died following an eight-hour wait for a doctor in a hospital last year.
GJ and Hazel van der Werken, of Burlington, Ont., said their 16-year-old son, Finlay, had a few days of mild illness and was suffering from migraines before his condition began to worsen. Hazel rushed him to Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital on Feb. 7, 2024, she said.
And who received treatment in advance of this young man?
When you picture yourself on summer vacation, are you on a beach? Or an operating table? For some travellers, the answer is a bit of both.
Call it a medical vacation. About 432,000 Canadians, faced with rising treatment costs at home, are expected to seek medical care abroad this year, 44 per cent more than two years earlier, according to the Medical Tourism Association. They travel for dental work, cosmetic surgeries, and fertility treatments, as well as more serious procedures like knee and hip replacements.
Allyson Vandenberg of Toronto was rejected for back surgery before even stepping into a doctor’s office, at a point when her pain had become unbearable, she said.
“One doctor agreed to see me — with an eight-month wait — then rejected me before even entering the room,” she wrote in an email to CTVNews.ca. In severe pain, she began considering medical assistance in dying.
“I had started saying goodbye,” she said.
