Canada is facing a growing maternal care crisis, marked by rising mortality rates among mothers as well as high infant mortality rates compared to other comparable countries, a new study suggests.
The report from SecondStreet.org found that Canada’s maternal mortality rate has risen 43 percent over the past two decades, and infant outcomes lag behind many comparable countries.
An emergency room physician who works at three Toronto hospitals is raising alarm bells over the capacity of some ERs in the city, calling the volume of patients “insane, out-of-control, explosive, never seen before, [and] record-breaking.”
Dr. Raghu Venugopal has worked in emergency rooms for 19 years and said if you ask any ER doctor right now, they would say the current situation concerning.
The number one issue, Venugopal suggested, is that people don’t have other access treatment.
To understand modern Sweden and how the country has transformed, consider Jens Eriksson’s career trajectory.
In his youth, Mr. Eriksson worked at music labels such as Stockholm Records, repping Swedish bands like the Cardigans around the world. Thirty years later, the arts aficionado runs a network of private health care clinics, a job he took after running a network of private schools – all in a high-tax, socialist country.
He admits he was an unlikely candidate for this leap. His own kids went to public school, and he had, too. But Mr. Eriksson’s evolution, like his country’s, was borne out of necessity. And it’s a path that provides Canadians with rather significant insights.
Half of Canadians have avoided seeking medical attention because of long wait times, while an overwhelming majority believe the country’s healthcare system needs major changes, according to a new national poll.
The survey, released Thursday by the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI), SecondStreet.org and the Canadian Constitution Foundation, found 50% of Canadians have avoided visiting a doctor or hospital because of delays in accessing care.
Canada spends the second-highest share of its economy on health care among 32 countries with universal or systems, yet ranks near the bottom for the availability of doctors, hospital beds, and much of its medical technology, according to a recent study.
The study, conducted by the Fraser Institute, examines how Canada compares with other high-income countries in health-care spending, resource availability, and access to medical services.
Wait times for most of the province’s publicly funded priority surgeries and procedures have increased between 2017 and 2025, according to a study released Monday.
MRI scans, cataract surgeries and all cancer surgeries are among eight priority procedures that saw increased wait times during the period, out of a total of 12, according to the study published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).
“It’s deeply alarming that so much money has been spent on for-profit surgeries and, yet, we don’t have the results to show what Ontarians are getting for those dollars,” said Andrew Longhurst, senior researcher at the centre.
I bet people abandoned OHIP in such numbers the private system is overwhelmed.
And what role does dumping the 3rd World into the mix have to do with this?
Sweden and Canada operate publicly financed universal health-care systems, but access to care in the Nordic country is “markedly better,” according to a new report from the Fraser Institute.
In 2024, wait times leading to unmet medical needs affected two per cent of Swedes, compared with 9.1 per cent of Canadians, says the report’s author, Yanick Labrie.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently posted on X, “[S]aying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliché than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive.” He conceded that “we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.” He’s right.
While the invention of useful AI tools has dramatically elevated scientists’ confidence that they’ll eventually find cures, the task is daunting. The number of plausible new biological molecules is greater than the quantity of water molecules in the world’s oceans. As large and powerful as current gigawatt-scale AI data centers are, the challenge of speeding up discovery is so monumental that it invokes the classic movie line, “You’re going to need a bigger boat.”
“Canadians have only access to eighteen per cent of all innovative medicines that are available around the world. Americans have access to over 90 per cent,” explains Dr. Bettina Hamelin, President and CEO of Innovative Medicines Canada, which represents Canadian pharmaceutical companies.
“Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, which are the richer countries in this world, have access to about 28 per cent [of innovative medicines]”, Hamelin says from her Toronto office, explaining that the big problems are time and money.
With the rise in popularity of the Democratic Socialist movement in the United States, one of the promises made to voters is “free healthcare.” Advocates frame healthcare as a human right, pointing north to Canada as the example of universal coverage.
The slogan is simple, powerful, and politically effective: Canadians enjoy free healthcare. The belief that Canadian healthcare is free stems from the fact that Canadians do not pay at the point of service. Yet the question remains: Is it truly free, and what does “free” actually mean?
OTTAWA — While Canadians like boasting of their “free health care,” a new report shows hidden tax bills related to Canada’s struggling medical system are climbing faster than household earnings.
Released this week by the Fraser Institute, the study entitled The Price of Public Health Care Insurance, 2026 shows the average Canadian family of four earning an average household income of $202,885 will spend an estimated $21,115 in health-care costs.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information has released its annual report on emergency department wait times, a litany of data that is as mind-numbing as it is depressing.
One in 10 people who head to their local ED wait more than 14 hours for care. For the sickest of the sick, those who need to be admitted to hospital, the waits are three times longer. One in 10 wait more than 48 hours, languishing on stretchers in hospital hallways. Individually, it can be much worse, like the 79-year-old man in Edmonton with severe influenza, who waited 90 hours for a bed.
CALGARY – A new report suggests the causes of Canada’s long emergency department wait times often lie far beyond the emergency room itself, with shortages in hospital beds, long-term care and community supports creating a bottleneck that is leaving some patients waiting days for care.
“This is a national problem. Every province is struggling with this,” said Dr. Paul Parks, president-elect of the Alberta Medical Association’s Section of Emergency Medicine and an emergency physician.
The report, released Thursday by the Canadian Institute for Health Information, found that one in 10 emergency department patients — about 1.5 million people — spent more than 14 hours in the emergency room in 2024-25.
“Increased population” was cited by an Alberta Doctor, not the report.
When is it enough?
This question has often run through my head. Maybe it’s the question everyone living with chronic illness asks themselves at certain times. Which is to say, “What is a good life? What is a life worth living?”
For 40 years I’ve lived with Type 1 diabetes. There have been good years and bad years. Complications, some challenging, most manageable, built up over time. Then, four years ago I developed long COVID. Diabetes was plenty to manage. Long COVID’s neurological effects took living with disability to a whole other level. It was, at times, too much.
Over 300 people died every week while waiting for treatment in British emergency rooms in 2025, where deadly overcrowding in hospitals is said to have been normalised, with half a million people forced to wait over 24 hours in a year.
Analysis of official government data by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimates that over 1,300 people died a month in Accident & Emergency (A&E) departments last year because they were forced to wait too long for treatment. The 15,860 avoidable deaths over the course of 2025 is ten times higher than a decade earlier, and is said to be a result of British hospitals where overcrowding has been normalised.
I wonder what the rate is in Canada.
