B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad said if he becomes premier after the fall election, he would establish guaranteed wait times for medical services such as surgeries and cancer treatment and increase the use of private clinics.

If the province can't meet wait-time guidelines, he says British Columbians would be sent out of province or out of the country for faster care.

"What that means is as a patient when you're looking for certain services, if we are not able to deliver that within the acceptable time here in British Columbia, then we'll arrange those services outside of our borders," Rustad said during a news conference Thursday in Vancouver in front of St. Paul's Hospital.

Rustad said a B.C. Conservative government would increase the reliance on private medical clinics to deliver services covered under the Medical Services Plan.

Under the Medicare Protection Act, private clinics are currently barred from allowing patients to pay for services covered by MSP.

The B.C. government spent more than a decade fighting the issue of extra billing in court. Last year, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a lower court ruling which determined that using private clinics for MSP-covered services would create a two-tier medical system.

Rustad did not have a cost estimate for his platform, but he promised millions in savings by slashing health-care administrators who, he said, are contributing to a bloated, inefficient system.

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Dr. Devon Mitchell, a Vancouver-based resident emergency physician and spokesperson for the Canadian Doctors for Medicare, said he has "very little faith" that private, for-profit clinics owned by investors can provide efficient care.

"Because at the end of the day, if you're delivering the same service but you have to carve off an extra five to eight per cent for your shareholders, there's no way you can deliver that at cost," he said. "Ultimately, you're just getting the same care for a higher cost with less oversight because it's happening in a private facility."

Ravi Parmar, BC NDP MLA for Langford-Juan de Fuca, said Rustad's health-care plan would slash $4 billion from the public health-care system and "take resources away and move doctors and nurses from our public health-care system over to a private system."

However, the B.C. government is itself using private clinics in the U.S. to deal with the cancer care backlog in this province.

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Since Health Minister Adrian Dix announced the program in May 2023, just over 800 breast and prostate cancer patients have travelled to one of two private cancer clinics in Bellingham, Wash., for radiation therapy. The program has cost taxpayers $16 million so far.

Dix has said the Bellingham program is a short-term measure while B.C. expands cancer care through new treatment centres in Kamloops, Nanaimo, Burnaby and Surrey.

Rustad said the wait times in the cancer care system are "horrendous" and "beyond what is acceptable."

B.C. currently has some of the longest wait times for radiation therapy in the country.

According to B.C. Cancer, 80 per cent of cancer patients are receiving radiation within the four-week clinical benchmark, well below the national average of 94 per cent.

During his own health-care announcement in Prince George Thursday, B.C. United Leader Kevin Falcon said Rustad is stealing his party's ideas on private medical clinics.

"If it sounds familiar, it should because we announced exactly the same thing a few weeks ago," Falcon said. "This is a pattern with John Rustad's party where they essentially take our policy ideas because they have none and copy them."

Falcon also said if he becomes premier, he'll ramp up the hiring of health-care workers in rural and remote communities through a strategy that would increase training spaces and boost incentives for working in under-served communities.

Several rural communities, including Merritt, Williams Lake, Fort St. John, Lillooet and Oliver, have had their emergency rooms shut down for days at a time because of a lack of staff.

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Falcon also promised to build a new patient care tower at the University Hospital of Northern British Columbia, which would include a cardiac care unit and helipad.

Both Rustad and Falcon have promised to drop the COVID-19 vaccine mandates and hire back the approximately 1,800 health-care workers who were fired by the province because they are unvaccinated.

Rustad has previously said he would compensate those workers for their lost wages.

When asked about that on Thursday, he said he'd form a committee to examine how best to compensate those workers.