Social Policy in Ontario

Canada doesn’t need another headline about doctors — it needs a plan

Posted on December 22, 2025 in Health Debates

Source: TheStar.com — Authors: Debakanta Jena

TheStar.com – Opinion
Dec. 22, 2025.   By Debakanta Jena Contributor

“Canada’s problem is not a lack of potential physicians, but a failure of planning and foresight,” writes Dr. Debakanta Jena.

In May, 96-year-old retired teacher Dorothy Lamont placed a small classified ad in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald titled “Seeking a Physician.” After nearly three years without a family doctor, she wrote that she was “in the 80,000s” on Nova Scotia’s wait-list.

I do not know Ms. Lamont, but I know her story. I see versions of it every week: seniors waiting half a day in emergency rooms; families delaying care; conditions becoming dangerous because nobody had the time or continuity to intervene.

Against that reality, Ottawa announced 5,000 permanent-residence spots for international doctors, along with a new application stream and promises of 14-day processing. But permanent residence is not a licence to practise medicine. A work permit is not a training pathway. None of this creates residency positions, expands assessment capacity, or increases supervised integration — steps needed to determine whether physicians can safely join a publicly funded system.

And it leaves untouched the most glaring fact: more than 13,000 internationally trained physicians already live in Canada without any pathway to practise. Before adding thousands more, we should ask why so many already here cannot even be assessed.

For years, immigration has been the quickest lever for government, even as unplanned growth strained health care, classrooms, and social supports. A new announcement cannot fix a physician shortage that population policy helped expose.

As someone who trained in India, England, and Canada — and who teaches and trains medical students and family doctors and examines surgeons for the Royal College — I understand what high standards require and why Canadians depend on them.

As a medical leader for more than a decade, I have seen how systems work and how they fail. And when I volunteered in the COVID wards to support colleagues, I saw what happens when a system without capacity reaches its limits.

Canada’s problem is not a lack of potential physicians, but a failure of planning and foresight.

We have excellent universities, committed faculty, and thousands of talented young Canadians who aspire to serve their communities — yet entry into Canadian medical school remains extremely restrictive. Training capacity has not expanded in proportion to population growth or need. Exceptional Canadian students are turned away, while to address shortages of our own making we recruit urgently from abroad, often without sufficient capacity to assess training equivalency. This contradiction sits at the very heart of Canada’s physician workforce crisis.

We have the need. We have the talent. We have the institutions. But we have not connected the dots. It’s time to build the system Canadians deserve.

A real national strategy should be straightforward:

• First, expand Canadian medical training — not only in family medicine but across specialties — so that within a decade we have a cohort of homegrown physicians who understand our health system and our communities.
• Second, build rigorous, fair pathways for internationally trained physicians already here; many will meet Canadian standards with structured evaluation or supervised integration.
• Third, when recruiting abroad, focus on jurisdictions with training already recognized as substantially equivalent, so physicians can transition safely.

None of this will work without supporting the physicians who train our next generation. Across Canada’s universities and community hospitals, thousands of doctors teach, supervise, and assess trainees out of commitment to their profession — often with little or no compensation. Their dedication is the backbone of medical training. Any serious plan must treat these educators as partners in planning, not an afterthought.

This work is not glamorous. Workforce planning is meticulous, disciplined, and slow — the same qualities medicine demands. But if we commit to that work, within a decade Canada can have the stable, ethical, patient-centred workforce our communities deserve.

When Ms. Lamont placed her advertisement, she was not asking for another headline about permanent-residence spots. She was asking for continuity, for safety, for a doctor who could follow her over time. Announcements about immigration streams may grab headlines, but Canadians live the consequences every day.

Dr. Debakanta Jena is chief of orthopedic surgery at Medicine Hat Regional Hospital, associate professor at the University of Calgary and a first-generation immigrant to Canada.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/canada-doesn-t-need-another-headline-about-doctors-it-needs-a-plan/article_060ff400-25cf-44cc-9430-d4f496ba08f1.html

Tags: economy, Education, Health, immigration

This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2025 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Health Debates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.