Canada Isn’t Short of Family Doctor Training Seats, It’s Short of Doctors Who Want the Job. The seats are there. The doctors aren’t taking them.

• 139 family doctor training positions sat empty this year
• Canada isn’t short of places to train family doctors. It’s short of doctors who want the job.

Every spring, Canada’s medical graduates are matched to residency positions, the two to five years of paid, supervised training that turns a medical degree into a doctor who can practice. It is the narrowest point in the whole pipeline. No seat, no doctor.

This year, 1,858 of those seats were in family medicine. Two hundred and fifty-five went unfilled in the first round of matching. After a second round, 139 were still empty.

Across every medical discipline in the country, 181 training positions went unfilled. One hundred and thirty-nine of them, more than three-quarters, were family medicine.

That number reverses the story most of us have been told. Canada is not short of places to train family doctors. It is short of medical graduates who want to become one.

What the graduates can see

They can see what the job has become because they spend their training years watching it.

In 2025, only 67.5 percent of Canadian family doctors three years past residency were providing or intending to provide comprehensive care to a group of patients over the long term. That is the lowest figure in eight years. Roughly 30 percent of family doctors are already practicing outside primary care entirely.

One in five is planning to stop seeing patients regularly. Most of those are older physicians heading for retirement, but 13 percent of the younger ones are stopping too and 58 percent of that group intend to keep working in medicine, just not in family practice. Sixty-five percent of them report at least one symptom of burnout.

They are not leaving medicine. They are going to urgent care, emergency departments, palliative care, student health, long-term care, and psychotherapy. Dr. Ferrukh Faruqui, who left a comprehensive practice in 2021 “very, very burned out,” now works at an urgent care clinic in Ottawa, where she says she feels she is making a difference.

Meanwhile, 5.7 million Canadian adults do not have a regular health care provider at all.

Three things that made the job this way

The paperwork. Canadian physicians spend an estimated 18.5 million hours a year on unnecessary administrative work. The Canadian Medical Association puts that at the equivalent of 55.6 million patient visits. Roughly 38 percent of it could be eliminated outright. Because most clinical systems require the physician’s own login, the work cannot be handed to office staff the way it once was. One family medicine professor describes what the role has turned into: family doctors have become “data-entry clerks.”

The pay is unreadable. Almost 80 per cent of Canadian family physicians are now paid through some blend of fee-for-service and alternate payment plans. The blend differs by province, and in Ontario it can differ between two practices on the same street. A graduate weighing a specialty can compare the length of training and what the work pays at the end of it. A graduate weighing family practice often cannot work out what they would earn, or what the clinic would cost them to run, until they are already in it.

The job never closes. Patient portals run around the clock and patients reasonably expect answers. Taking a vacation means finding a colleague to watch the inbox. Patients are older, sicker and more complex than they were a decade ago, and there are more drugs and more tests to keep track of every year. The result is a job that is never fully put down.

What should be done

Training capacity still matters, and where it is genuinely capped it should be raised. This year 87 Canadian medical graduates finished medical school and did not get a residency position at all, up from 49 the year before. Every one of them is a fully qualified graduate the public has already paid to educate, left standing outside the system that trained them. That is a straightforward waste and it should be fixed.

But funded seats are not the same thing as working doctors. You can pay for a family medicine residency position and watch it sit empty, which is precisely what happened 139 times this year. Funding the seat is the easy half. The hard half is making the job at the end of it one that a twenty-eight-year-old carrying student debt would actually choose.

Three things would help, and none of them require training a single additional person:

1. Find out why the seats went empty, and publish it. There is no national data on why graduates turn away from family practice. Governments are making workforce decisions worth billions without it. Ask the graduates who did not choose it, and put the answers on the record.
2. Cut the administrative load. The CMA has already identified 38 per cent of it as removable. This is the fastest relief available to a system with 5.7 million adults and no regular provider between them, and it costs nothing to start.
3. Make the pay model legible. A graduate should be able to see, before committing, what family practice pays in their province and what running the clinic will cost them. Right now that is guesswork, and guesswork loses to a salaried hospital job every time.

The bottom line

We have been treating this as a supply problem and counting the wrong thing. The seats were there this year. What the country could not produce was people willing to sit in them.

Until the job itself changes, every new training position we fund is a bet that someone will want it.