Canada’s health-care system is killing us

You wait. You suffer. Sometimes, you die waiting. And yet politicians and the courts keep defending a broken health-care system

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How often do you hear of parents who’ve taken a sick or injured child to the emergency room only to wait untold hours before a nurse even glances in their direction? One carpenter doing work for us had to watch his severely injured eight-year-old daughter writhe in pain from noon until 11 p.m. before she finally received treatment. Eleven hours. In Canada.

She’s not alone. Across the country, families without family doctors turn to overcrowded ERs, only to leave in frustration—or worse. A May 2025 report from the Foundation for Economic Education noted that “more than 1.3 million Canadians abandoned emergency room visits due to excessive wait times. Some hospitals have exceeded 200 per cent capacity, forcing patients into hallways and onto floors.”

That was based on 2023 data. Eighteen months later, Canada’s government health-care monopoly has gone from sick to critical.

In January 2025, the National Post reported that 15,474 Canadians died in 2023–24 while waiting for diagnostic scans or surgeries: the true number is likely double that. Death by bureaucracy.

Two recent Fraser Institute commentaries paint the same bleak picture. Senior fellow Nadeem Esmail notes that Canada ranks dead last among peer nations for timely access to care, despite being one of the most expensive universal health-care systems in the world. Mackenzie Moir and Bacchus Barua, citing the U.S.-based Commonwealth Fund, highlight that all other high-income Commonwealth countries allow or encourage private-pay options. Canada remains the lone holdout: a position that didn’t happen by accident.

Together, these findings underscore a deeper truth: this isn’t really about medicine, it’s about ideology. A belief that banning private options ensures fairness. Ironically, that “fairness” often comes at the cost of access.

Dr. Brian Day, an internationally respected orthopedic surgeon in Vancouver, tells part of the story in his new book My Fight for Canadian Health Care. Here’s an excerpt:

“In 1984, the Canada Health Act was passed, suppressing private competition. But politicians didn’t consider how they would fund their plans. By the late 1980s, funding constraints forced hospitals to reduce operating room hours. Surgical time allocated to me and my colleagues was progressively cut from twenty to five hours per week, often less due to emergency cases. Together with a small group of friends and supporters, I decided to establish a small private surgical centre. Cambie Surgery opened in 1996. Our procedures encompassed all surgical specialties, and we often did them at 40 to 50 per cent of the cost. Prior to our opening, many complex procedures were only performed in public hospitals. By transferring them to our centre, public hospital wait times were reduced and capacity was increased.”

Cambie operated with little government interference until 2009, when the B.C. Nurses’ Union lobbied the province to shut down private clinics under the new Medicare Protection Act. What followed was a drawn-out, punishing legal battle that went from provincial court to the B.C. Court of Appeal.

The Appeals Court ruled against Cambie, even though the judge acknowledged that “wait times in considerable measure flow from government rationing of health care.” He added, “I will await the Supreme Court’s decision,” making it clear he expected the case to land on the nation’s highest bench. A retired Supreme Court justice advising Dr. Day remarked, “They’ll have to hear the case because very few matters are more important than health care.”

And yet the Chief Justice declined to hear it. Case closed, and with it, any illusion of judicial independence.

Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had vowed to defend the Canada Health Act. The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear Cambie’s appeal made one thing painfully obvious: the Court is no longer independent of the government. (The Canada Health Act is the federal law that governs publicly funded health insurance in Canada. It effectively bans patients from paying privately for medically necessary services, even if the public system can’t deliver them on time.)

So what’s Mark Carney’s big idea for fixing our dangerously dysfunctional health-care system? According to a Liberal campaign media release, his plan is to “add thousands of new doctors.” Simple, right?

But adding doctors requires more than a press release. A July 30 Globe and Mail article noted that in many of Canada’s top university programs, even grades in the mid-90s aren’t enough to get in. And even if we admitted more students, they’d still face a second bottleneck: residency spots, which are tightly controlled by provincial governments.

So unless Carney’s planning to clone doctors, we may want to rethink the math.

At its core, Canada’s health-care crisis is the predictable result of a bloated, government-run bureaucracy: one that bans competition, chokes supply and calls it “equity.” Bureaucracies almost always fail, and usually at an astronomical cost.

There’s no higher cost than this: the lives, pain and livelihoods of millions of ill, injured or dying Canadians. All sacrificed at the altar of a broken system we’re too proud—or too scared—to change.

Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who has been a director of five global corporations.