Canada’s Health Care Wait Times Are Still Too Long. Is It Time for a National Review?

In 2002, Anthony Fell stood in front of the Canadian Club in Toronto and gave a speech he called “Healthcare at the Crossroads.”

He read out a list. Doctor and nurse shortages. Emergency rooms backing up. Shortages of medical equipment. Cancer surgery waits stretching to two months. And an average national wait of twelve weeks for an MRI.

He was careful with his language. He would not call these things a crisis. A crossroads is a place where you still have a choice about which direction you take.

That was twenty-four years ago.

In 2025, the average Canadian wait for an MRI was 18.1 weeks — up from 16.2 weeks the year before. The median wait from a family doctor’s referral to actually receiving treatment reached 28.6 weeks. And the wait between being referred by your GP and simply sitting down in front of a specialist was 15.3 weeks.

Nearly four months to get in the room. More than six months to be treated.

Fell is now 87. Last month he took out a full-page advertisement in The Globe and Mail, signed simply “Anthony S. Fell, Citizen of Canada.” It said that Canadians deserve better health care. That the system was built on compassion and now needs renewal. And that it is time for solutions, not silence.

We agree with him.

The case for a national review

What Fell is calling for is an independent, non-partisan commission — roughly a dozen people with real expertise in health care, economics, law and patient experience — given twelve months to study how high-performing systems work elsewhere and report practical recommendations to Parliament.

He points to Scandinavia. Germany. The Netherlands. Australia. Singapore. Countries with universal systems that consistently move patients through faster than ours does.

The reason this matters is not that a commission is exciting. Commissions are not exciting. It matters because the last full review of the Canada Health Act reported in 2002 — the same year as Fell’s speech. Every serious conversation Canada has had about its health system since then has happened in fragments: a provincial announcement here, a funding transfer there, a task force on one specialty, a pilot project in one region.

Meanwhile the numbers went the wrong way.

You cannot fix a system by repairing it one section at a time while never asking whether the design still works. That is the argument, and it is a sound one.

What we would want a commission to examine first

Common Sense Healthcare Canada is not a think tank and we do not pretend to have modelled the whole system. But we talk to patients and clinicians constantly, and there are questions we would want any national review to put at the top of its list.

Start with the specialist bottleneck. A 15.3-week wait to see a specialist is not a scheduling problem. It is a supply problem, and it is largely a made-in-Canada one. Provincial governments have for decades imposed limits on the number of medical school and residency positions, based on workforce forecasts that turned out to be wrong and cost-control targets that treated physicians as an expense line rather than as capacity. We are living inside the results of those decisions. A commission with the standing to say so plainly, with the evidence attached, would be worth the twelve months on its own.

Ask why a referral takes as long as it does. A meaningful share of the 15.3 weeks is not clinical. It is faxes. It is paperwork. It is a patient being sent to the wrong specialist because there is no central visibility into who has capacity. None of that requires a constitutional debate to fix.

Look honestly at what other universal systems do differently. Germany, the Netherlands and Australia all deliver universal coverage. They also move patients faster than we do. Whatever they are doing that we are not, Canadians are entitled to know what it is, described accurately, rather than being told the question itself is dangerous.

Count what the waiting costs. Not only in dollars, though there are dollars. In cancers found later than they should have been. In pain managed for months that should have been treated in weeks. In people who left the workforce because they could not get an answer.

What this is not

Corcoran’s column raises the question of how services get delivered and by whom. That debate is real, it is old, and it is where most Canadian health care conversations go to die — each side arriving with its position already written.

We are not going to pre-judge it, and we would ask the same of the commission’s critics. Common Sense Healthcare Canada does not exist to advocate for any particular delivery model. We exist because a patient waiting 28.6 weeks does not care about the argument. They care about the wait.

That is also precisely why an independent review is the right instrument. Questions this contested should be settled by people with evidence in front of them and no stake in the answer — not by whoever has the loudest advertisement.

Both things are true

Canada’s universal health care system is worth protecting. It is also failing to do the thing it exists to do, on a timeline that has now run to nearly a quarter century.

Holding both of those thoughts at once is not a contradiction. It is the only honest starting position.

Fell’s ad ended with a line worth repeating: the time for political silence is over.

Twenty-four years is long enough to stand at a crossroads. At some point, standing still is the decision.

Protect what works. Transform what doesn’t. Put patients first.

Common Sense Healthcare Canada is a non-partisan movement of patients, clinicians and citizens working for a health system that delivers. Join us at commonsensehealthcarecanada.com.

Sources:

• Terence Corcoran, “Canada needs a new national health-care commission,” Financial Post
• Fraser Institute, Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, 2025
• Anthony S. Fell, “Healthcare at the Crossroads,” Canadian Club of Toronto, 2002