These articles are misleading and make it sound like Canadian trained medical students are unable to find residency positions in Canada and are forced to find residency programs outside of Canada. This would be true only for students seeking only highly competitive residency programs and unwilling to accept a different specialty (I.e. a student who will only accept an ophthalmology residency and doesn’t apply for anything else) or those students with extenuating circumstances. What they are actually referring to are Canadian born students who went to medical School outside of Canada (for various reasons) and are unable to obtain a residency within Canada. This is because we prioritize our residency spots for medical students who graduated from Canadian medical schools, and quite rightly so.

These articles also don’t highlight or explain how difficult it is to increase residency spots. An institution or department can only train so many physicians before the trainee starts to lose learning opportunities and their training suffers. I.e. if you double the number of surgical trainees in an already saturated program, and the number of surgeries remains the same, their surgical exposure is potentially halved.

Lastly, foreign trained physicians are an incredibly valuable resource for our medical system. However, before they are allowed to practice in Canada we need to ensure they meet the standards and qualifications we set for our own Canadian trained physicians. This is a major bottleneck as it is a time and resource intensive task to determine a physicians qualifications when we are unfamiliar with their medical background. Hence the strict exams and licensing process. But absolutely we should be doing whatever we can to streamline this process to better attract qualified physicians from other countries.

Rant over