Understanding British Columbia’s Public Management Challenge finds that despite substantial spending increases by the B.C. government, the province’s health-care wait times have increased and student test scores have declined.
Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, 2023 is an annual survey of physicians across Canada, finding a median wait time of 27.7 weeks—the longest ever recorded—with national wait times longest between a referral by a GP and plastic, orthopaedic, and neurosurgery, while shortest for radiation and medical oncology treatments.
Mental Health Care: How is Canada Doing? compares Canada’s mental health services to other countries with universally accessible health care and finds that, despite the Canadian government spending a larger share of health dollars on mental health services, Canada has relatively fewer psychiatric care beds (ranking 22nd out of 28 nations), psychiatrists (ranking 16th out of 28 nations), and psychologists (ranking 15th out of 26 nations) in addition to growing wait times.
Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, 2022 is a new study that finds Canada’s health-care wait times reached 27.4 weeks in 2022—the longest ever recorded—and 195 per cent higher than the 9.3 weeks Canadians waited in 1993, when the Fraser Institute began tracking medical wait times. Before this year, the longest recorded wait time was 25.6 weeks in 2021. Prince Edward Island has the longest wait times in the country this year, and Ontario recorded the shortest wait time, which was still more than five months long.
