Meet the Canadian-born doctors who can't work in Canada

Thousands of Canadian-born doctors are working abroad at a time when the country is facing an acute shortage of physicians — and there's little prospect of them practising here because of barriers that block foreign-trained professionals from launching a career at home.

While it's difficult to establish just how many Canadian doctors are working overseas, a CBC News analysis of publicly available data suggests they number in the tens of thousands.

Since the early 1990s, the number of Canadian international graduates who aren't matched with residencies has grown significantly. Medical schools, which run the system, privilege their own Canadian-educated students over home-grown doctors trained abroad for the limited number spots that are available each year.

In 2022, for example, only 439 foreign-trained Canadian doctors out of a pool of 1,661 applicants were actually matched with residencies — post-graduate training that is required in order to be licensed. That's a 26.6 per cent match rate.

That means 1,222 would-be doctors were cut loose and forced to find work elsewhere, according to data from the Canadian Resident Matching Service (CaRMS).

And these are not foreigners — you must be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident to even apply for a residency in Canada.

The number of CaRMS applicants doesn't tell the whole story.

An untold number of Canadians go to school in countries like Australia, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the U.S. They tend not to apply for residencies at home because they know how unlikely it is they'll be matched.

Dr. Steve Brennan was one of those students.

Rejected by Canada, he's now a pediatric pulmonologist and the associate director of the rare lung disease centre at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

He's the kind of specialist Canada needs. The American Thoracic Society has said there's a "critical shortage" of these doctors; fewer than 1,000 of them are actually practising in the U.S. They're even scarcer north of the border.

Born in St. Albert, Alta., Brennan did his undergraduate degree in social work in Canada. Growing up in a family of nurses, Brennan ultimately decided medicine was his true calling. He applied to a number of Canadian medical schools but wasn't accepted.

He's not alone. Few medical school spots are available in Canada — the acceptance rate was just 5.5 per cent last year, according to university data.

Twenty years ago, there were 2,044 first-year medical school positions available at 16 universities nationwide. In 2020-21, there were about 2,800 positions available at 17 schools. Canada has added some eight million people to its population over the same time period.

Brennan went to the University of Queensland in Australia and graduated in 2013 with 100 other Canadian students. He said six of his closest Canadian friends in that graduating class also skipped out on a Canadian residency altogether.

'Why bother?'

"I didn't even try to come home. I just knew how hard it would be," Brennan told CBC News.

"We had someone from the B.C. residency program come to Australia and they basically said, 'Don't come back.' The statistically low match rate means even some of the top students don't get through. So I said, 'Why bother?'

"It's really sad because I went to medical school thinking I'd just come back to Canada. I think that's what all of us thought. Going to school in Australia — it's a way to be a doctor, but it's not actually a way to be a doctor in Canada."

While he was reluctant to leave Canada, his mum and sister in Vancouver and his dad in Calgary, Brennan turned to the U.S., where international medical graduates are more than twice as likely to land a residency.

"They have enough spots to accommodate every single American student and a ton of internationals," he said. "They've got it figured out."

Brennan has made a career in St. Louis studying and treating children with asthma, cystic fibrosis and genetic disorders like primary ciliary dyskinesia. He's married with kids and lives near his in-laws.

Canada is short nearly 17,000 physicians

But he can't help but think the Canadian system is "a bit cruel" because it keeps Canadian doctors like him away from their own country — and the family and friends they left behind.

Brennan said there's a reason why the number of internationally trained applicants for Canadian residency positions has fallen steadily from 2,219 in 2013 to 1,661 in 2022 — a drop of 25 per cent in just a decade.

"In Canada, the system is just not really set up to take international graduates," he said. "Word gets out.

"And that's a problem because the health-care system cannot rely solely on Canadian doctors. That's clearly not working. You have to alter the system somehow if you really want to train people in Canada."

After years of restrained spending by federal and provincial governments and a generation of protectionist policies that restrict access to residency, Canada's health-care system is short nearly 17,000 physicians, according to recent data compiled by the Royal Bank of Canada.

The problem is expected to get worse.

In less than a decade, as the baby boomer cohort retires en masse and the population grows by some 500,000 people a year, Canada will be short an estimated 43,900 physicians — including more than 30,000 family doctors and general practitioners, the bank reported.

Dr. Kate Stewart wanted to help Canada fill the gap. Born and raised in St. Catharines, Ont., Stewart did an undergraduate degree and got her master's at the University of Guelph.

Rejected by Canadian medical schools, Stewart set out for the University of Queensland, which ranks among the top schools in the world.

She's now a practising obstetrician-gynecologist in the Melbourne area.

Stewart was another Canadian who didn't bother with the CaARMS residency match process after she graduated in 2012.

She knew the chances of getting a position were slim — there were only three ob-gyn residency positions in all of Ontario open to international graduates that year.

She also didn't want to be separated from her Australian husband, who is an anesthesiologist.

Stewart thought that after she completed her residency and specialist training in Australia, she could come home and live near her parents in Ontario's Niagara region.

But after doing a deep dive on the process, she realized it was difficult to get the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, which oversees the accreditation of specialists in Canada, to recognize her Australian credentials.

While the Royal College has a streamlined process for trained specialists coming from select Commonwealth and other western countries, Stewart would still be forced to sit for an exam — a test that requires at least 20 to 30 hours of study per week for a year.

Stewart said she can't juggle that with her obligations as a doctor and as a parent to two young girls.

"It's really not something I'm interested in doing again. I've been there and I've done that," she told CBC News.

She'd also be out $8,000 — there's a fee to assess her "exam eligibility" and a separate fee for the exam itself. The test can't be done remotely — she'd have to come to Canada.

"I could pick up the phone tomorrow and ring the U.K. or New Zealand and I'd be able to apply for a job there without restrictions. It doesn't make sense to me why I couldn't do the same with Canada," she said.

"I've practised and worked and learned in a Western, English-speaking country with similar cultures and values. People coming from countries like New Zealand, Australia, the U.K., they have the capacity to integrate into the Canadian system as good workers, easily."

Her Australian husband, Dr. Chamath De Silva, was willing to move to Canada — but he also found the process daunting, time-consuming and expensive.

It's a shame, Stewart said, because the Niagara region desperately needs anesthesiologists like De Silva. Last month, a hospital in Welland, Ont. had to cancel surgeries because there wasn't one available.

With Canada experiencing such an acute shortage of doctors, Stewart said the roadblocks thrown up by provinces and regulatory bodies are puzzling.

"The country should be grateful that these Canadians are willing to come back and be completely overworked and underpaid," she said. "And you didn't even have to pay to educate them."