Emergency Room Wait Times Up Across Canada: Federal Data

A health care worker makes his way into the Emergency Department of the Vancouver General Hospital in Vancouver on March 30, 2020. Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press

Close to 14 million Canadians visited an emergency room between April 2021 and March 2022 and those patients faced increased wait times at hospitals across the country, according to data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI).

The data released by CIHI on Dec. 8 shows that 90 percent of emergency department visits for patients who were admitted to hospital in 2021-2022 were completed within 40.7 hours—up from 33.5 hours the year prior.