The report, which broke down provincial government health data provided via Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, found there were nearly 24,000 Canadians and non-citizens died while on waitlists for either surgeries or diagnostic scans.
“Who wants to spend the final year of their life…stuck in your apartment with severe pain while you wait for your hip operation?” Second Street president Colin Craig told The Hub. “What provincial governments should be looking at are chronic cases and then making changes to the system so that they can reduce patient suffering.”
In the last decade, more and more Canadians have experienced extended wait times for surgeries and diagnostic procedures due to an increased demand from an ageing domestic population and the major population growth of several million—3.8 million in the past five years alone—from temporary residents and permanent immigration.
The think tank’s latest report found an average uptick of 3 percent more patients dying while on waitlists in different jurisdictions compared to the previous year (2023-24).
According to a Fraser Institute study from last year, Canadian doctors reported a median wait time of 30 weeks from the time of referral from a general practitioner until treatment, up 2.3 weeks from 2023.
PEI and New Brunswick had the worst median wait times of 77.4 and 69.4 weeks, respectively. Ontario (23.6), Quebec (28.9), B.C. (29.5) ranked better. Meanwhile, Alberta (38.4), Saskatchewan (37.2), and Manitoba (37.9) were in the middle of the pack.
Patients on the waitlists Second Street analyzed died from as little as a week into waiting, or as long as nine years. However, the study did not look at direct causation of death.
In the most egregious cases of patient deaths on waitlists, they found 355 patients died before getting delayed cardiac surgery or a cardiac procedure. Since gathering data from the 2018 fiscal year, Second Street has found 100,876 cases where patients died before getting the requested health care
Second Street’s national dataset was incomplete because only parts of Manitoba’s numbers are available, and none of Alberta’s (the province does not collect data on patients dying while on waitlists). The study also didn’t include patients dying while waiting for specialists because most health authorities don’t track such data.
“The data that we get is sort of a little bit like Swiss cheese,” Craig admitted. “We know there were at least [nearly] 24,000 waitlist deaths, but there’s a lot of data that’s missing, so the number, if we had the complete picture, would only go up quite significantly.”
Craig explained that Second Street’s FOI requests cost hundreds of dollars in administrative fees, given that many of the health agencies don’t actively collect and track waitlist data proactively.
“Certainly governments should do a better job tracking cases where patients are dying on waiting lists, analyzing what’s going on, and reporting the details publicly,” Craig added. “We also need to be asking health ministers, ‘Why don’t you want to know this data?’”
Last month, the Fraser Institute released a research study showing that despite Canada having the third-most expensive universal health-care system in the OECD, we ranked ninth for health-care wait times, eighth for seeing a specialist, and ninth for wait times for elective surgery. Diagnostic equipment availability in Canada fared even worse. Canada ranked 28th for CT scanners, 27th for MRI units, 22nd for PET scanners, and 13th for mammographs.
Despite Alberta not being included in the dataset, Minister of Primary and Preventative Health Services Adriana LaGrange told The Hub this week that the wild rose province was also experiencing significant wait times for surgeries.
“[When] I first started, roughly about 40 to 45 percent of surgeries were being done in clinically approved times,” LaGrange said. “Now we’re nearing 70 percent in clinically approved times.”
This week, Alberta introduced new legislation that aims to allow the province’s doctors to provide both public and private care to help further reduce wait times. The measures in the bill do not contravene the Canada Health Act.
The dual model plans have not come without criticism from those defending Canada’s current health-care system, including the Alberta Medical Association, which insisted major details need to still be hammered out.
But Second City’s Colin Craig believes this is a welcome change and that other provinces will need to adopt a more multi-tiered health-care system in order to modernize and achieve timely medical care for all Canadians. He cited countries like France, Japan, and Sweden as examples of places where they have public-private health-care systems that have eliminated long wait times for care.
“Reform takes time…But the question really, for other provinces is, are they going to keep doing the same thing that they’ve done for 30 years, [throwing] money at the system and hope something improves,” Craig said. “And the sooner they [adopt] what European health-care systems are doing…the sooner these numbers come down.”