"We’re blaming our overstuffed ERs, excruciating surgery waits and family doctor deserts on exactly the wrong people".
BC Health Care Matters ·
Dr. Iris Gorfinkel, Toronto Star March 5. Iris Gorfinkel is a family physician and clinical researcher in Toronto.
As wait times soar and millions struggle without a family doctor, the old “blame the immigrants” narrative has made a comeback in Canadian politics and media.
This kind of rhetoric shuts down debate, fuels xenophobia and deflects responsibility. It crushes mutual respect and replaces it with fear, resentment and hatred.
Here’s what the data actually show.
Immigrants have kept Canada’s health care system standing by delivering critical bedside care. They’re increasingly smeared as a “burden,” yet internationally educated professionals are essential to the workforce. Over 1-in-4 family doctors and nearly 1-in-3 pharmacists in Canada were internationally trained in 2022.
Now add to this dentists, registered nurses, nurse aides and personal support workers, up to 30 per cent of whom are immigrants.
If even a fraction of these workers walked away, ER closures would increase and waits for surgery and long-term care would grow even longer.
Immigrants didn’t cause Ontario’s hospital bed shortage. That began decades before the recent spike in immigration. Severe cuts to acute hospital beds predated today’s influx by nearly two generations, leaving Ontario with among the fewest staffed acute-care hospital beds in Canada.
Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office put numbers to the crisis: between 2005 and 2019, Ontario’s 65-plus population grew 56 per cent, but the number of hospital beds went up by a paltry 3 per cent. This isn’t an “immigrant problem” — it’s a planning fiasco.
Immigrants didn’t cause long ER waits. Chronic underfunding did. Nearly 1-in-6 acute hospital beds — about 5,000 — is occupied by a patient awaiting alternate level of care.
These patients no longer require acute care but can’t be discharged because they’re not well enough. Yet the long-term care, home care or rehab they need is limited by chronic underfunding, so they continue to occupy hospital beds.
That bottleneck costs far more and strands thousands of patients overnight on stretchers in ER hallways while waiting for an available bed. Fewer available acute beds lengthen surgical wait times as well.
To be sure, a growing and aging population adds pressure. But pressure only becomes crisis when governments fail to build the added capacity needed.
And fail they did: governments of all stripes kept shrinking hospital capacity and home care. In the 1990s, Progressive Conservative Premier Mike Harris presided over cuts of almost 9,000 acute and chronic care beds — about one-third of the total at the time — and eliminated 25,000 positions, including nurses and support staff.
Liberal governments led by Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne later froze hospital budgets for years, forcing further bed and staff cuts. Even now, under Premier Doug Ford, new long-term care beds are being built, but the health-care staff needed to run them — and to deliver home care services — remains woefully inadequate.
Immigrants didn’t increase surgical wait times. The evidence points to policy-driven shortfalls in capacity and staffing. Governments were repeatedly warned about changing demographics and knew Ontarians were aging with more chronic health problems and complex needs.
Yet they still passed budgets that starved home care and severely limited availability in chronic and long-term care, leaving thousands of seniors on protracted wait-lists.
Cuts to hospital funding limited operating room hours and drove staff shortages. These are the underlying causes of longer surgical wait times, not immigration.
Blaming immigrants not only ignores clear data, it creates a simple villain for a complex crisis. It’s political strategizing that redirects public anger away from fiscal mismanagement toward immigrants who had nothing to do with poor governing.
It divides communities and fails to improve health care. Fomenting “us vs. them” scapegoats immigrants, stokes racial anxieties and creates the illusion that leaders are “taking back control.”
Immigrants aren’t a strain on the system — they’re the splint holding a fractured system together.
Message to politicians: Stop using newcomers as cover for decades of underfunding. We are Canadian — and we are not fooled.