Curt and Gwen Firestone live half the year in B.C. on Salt Spring Island and the other half in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Besides the obvious draw of sunny weather, the pair, who are in their 80s, chose Mexico because they require timely access to medical specialists, something they say they can’t get at home.
Canada’s emergency doctors are demanding better protection against administrative harassment and bullying for speaking out about dangerous overcrowding and unreported deaths in the country’s emergency rooms.
Among other measures, the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians is calling for “effective and enforced” whistleblower protection, arguing they risk personal and professional persecution for calling out unsafe conditions that are putting lives at risk.
The quest for better health care is a national obsession in many countries, and an important issue for Canadian seniors. When it comes to spending money on health care, Canada is doing well compared to other developed countries.
Baumol’s cost disease. New to me.
Six days in an overflow stretcher. Beds in storage rooms. Patients dying in their seats.
No, we’re not describing an episode of HBO’s gritty medical drama The Pitt. These are real-life scenes playing out in Canada’s emergency rooms.
From Carbonear, N.L., where a man recently died of a heart attack during a 10-hour wait to see a doctor, to Calgary, where a woman pleaded “please don’t let me die” during the hours she bled onto a stretcher in the ER, hospitals are bursting at the seams as backlogs and access issues affect patient flow.
Prolonged wait times for surgery and medical care cost Canadian patients more than $4.2 billion in lost wages and reduced productivity last year, a new study suggests.
The 1.4 million Canadians who waited for medically necessary treatment in 2025 lost an estimated $3,043 each due to reduced wages and decreased productivity at work, according to a March 10 report from the Fraser Institute.
Two people have died in Canada after donating plasma at a chain of clinics that has been under scrutiny by federal inspectors for failing to keep accurate records, screen donors or maintain its machines.
While experts say the deaths are exceedingly rare, critics say Canada’s embrace of private companies to handle blood products reflects a “slow collapse of a system that has been the envy of the world”.
Everything in Canada is turning to shit.
Dr. Alecs Chochinov recently received a private message from an emergency medicine colleague who has been practising for more than a decade. “I’ve never been so despondent,” it said.
“That single doctor is speaking for many,” Chochinov said. “People are despondent. They’re scared that there are going to be bad outcomes and they’re going to feel responsible. But they don’t see any respite.”
Health care was looking grimmer by the day back in 2023 in a rural corner of western Canada.
Family doctors had retired or moved, starting a chain reaction that cut in half the number serving the 12,000 residents of the Alberta town of Stettler and its surrounding county, also called Stettler.
People with preventable problems, but without family doctors, sought help in the town hospital’s emergency room. Then the emergency room began shutting down on some days because of a doctor shortage, forcing the unlucky to drive 50 miles to the nearest city.
About 450 people came to a hastily called meeting at the hockey arena.
Eight out of 10 provinces do not require health-care providers to inform patients about expected or maximum recommended wait times for surgery, a new report says, noting Canadians continue to face long wait times.
“Every year, thousands of patients die while waiting for treatment in Canada,” said the report, titled “All Provinces Need Greater Transparency Around Life-Saving Surgery,” published on Feb. 19 by think tank SecondStreet.org.
Tommy Douglas, not dead enough. https://t.co/0O54m10VKn
— Katewerk (@katewerk) February 20, 2026
Canada’s health-care system is facing a worsening crisis, with half of Canadians reporting they either don’t have a family doctor or struggle to see the one they have, according to new data from the Angus Reid Institute.
The survey highlights a decade-long decline in access.
On June 18, 2012, doctors and other health care workers all across the country staged a walkout to protest the government’s changes to refugee health care benefits in Canada. Roughly two months earlier, the Stephen Harper government had announced that cuts were coming to the Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP), which provides temporary health care coverage for refugees in Canada.
The IFHP had covered both basic care and extended services, such as vision, dental, and prescription medication, but that was ending: as of June 30, that extended coverage would be eliminated (with the exception of immunizations or medications for diseases that pose a public health risk) for all refugee claimants, and refugee claimants from designated “safe” countries would see their coverage pared back almost entirely.
Last week, in a story about the Doug Ford government’s plan to increase the number of private clinics and reduce wait times in Ontario, one Toronto-based doctor told CTV News that Ontario’s health-care system is in “remarkably good shape.”
According to the Progressive Conservative government, nearly a quarter of children in Ontario wait too long for general pediatric care. All children wait four months (on average) for “non-urgent” treatment, compared to the government’s ridiculously long target of no more than six months. Crucially, this is only after they first wait weeks or months to see a specialist or for any diagnostics (e.g. an MRI).
Over 100,000 Canadians sought medical care outside of the country last year as Liberals continue to prioritize assisted suicide over actual health care, according to a new report.
On January 13, the Fraser Institute published results from a survey of physicians across Canada, which found that 105,529 Canadians sought healthcare outside the country, amid month-long wait times to receive care in Canada.
When something ridiculous or scandalous happens in Edmonton, where I live, I make a point of calling attention to it, perhaps out of a misguided sense of professional honour. The city has now come to nationwide and even international attention for a reason that hits particularly close. A few days before Christmas, a 44-year-old man in good general health, Prashant Sreekumar, turned up at the Grey Nuns hospital with terrible chest pains that had begun at work.
Elon Musk is lashing out at Canada’s health-care system after an Edmonton father died in an hospital emergency room following an eight-hour wait to see a doctor.
“When the government does medical care, it is about as good as the DMV,” Musk wrote on X as he reshared a video that showed the man’s wife recapping her husband’s death.
When the government does medical care, it is about as good as the DMV https://t.co/kRdlL3idyF
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 26, 2025
