More than 23,000 Canadians have died while waiting for health care over the past year, recent government data suggests.
Think tank SecondStreet.org’s annual “Died on a Waiting List” report, released on Nov. 26, analyzes data sourced from provincial health authorities to determine how many people died while on a waiting list for surgery or diagnostic treatment.
A total of 23,746 Canadians died in the 2024–2025 fiscal year while awaiting treatment, the report found. That number does not include Alberta and some parts of Manitoba.
“What’s really sad is that behind many of these figures are stories of patients suffering during their final years – grandparents who dealt with chronic pain while waiting for hip operations, people leaving children behind as they die waiting for heart operations, so much suffering,” Craig said.
Patients who died last year were waiting for a variety of services, from heart surgery to diagnostic scans. One person who died had been on a waiting list for nine years, the report noted, but didn’t indicate what type of treatment the patient needed.
Provincial Numbers
Ontario recorded the highest number of deaths among wait-listed individuals, totalling 10,634, with Quebec following at 6,290. British Columbia reported 4,620 deaths while people awaited care, Nova Scotia saw 727 deaths, and Newfoundland and Labrador had 542.Overall, 100,876 Canadians on a waiting list have died since 2018, SecondStreet said.
Policy Recommendations
Craig made five recommendations for governments to advance health care in Canada, including improving tracking of wait-list deaths each year.“It’s interesting that governments will regularly inspect restaurants and report publicly if there’s a minor problem such as a missing paper towel holder. Meanwhile, no government reports publicly on patients dying on waiting lists,” he said.
“It’s quite hypocritical.”
The second recommendation is to transition health-care funding to activity-based funding, which would pay hospitals based on services provided instead of providing annual cheques.
“This means that patients are no longer thought of as people ‘to have to help’ but rather as customers that should be welcomed as they represent additional funding for the hospital,” Craig wrote. He said it would focus hospitals on patient care.
He also recommended governments develop partnerships with private sector companies to improve services and cut wait times.
“The Saskatchewan government credits their decision to hire private clinics with helping to reduce wait times and their surgical backlog beginning in 2010,” he said.
Craig added that Ontario’s auditor noted in 2014 that the services like MRIs, dialysis, and colonoscopies were between 20 and 40 percent less expensive in private clinics compared to hospitals.
He also recommended providing more health-care choices for patients by maintaining the public system while allowing non-government clinics to offer the same procedures.
“This approach would be similar to how parents across Canada can choose to put their children in public schools or pay out-of-pocket and send their children to non-government schools,” he wrote. Doing so would take pressure off the public health-care system, he said.
Lastly, Craig suggested Canada develop a similar policy to the EU’s Cross Border Healthcare Directive, which allows patients the right to travel to other EU countries for health care, pay for the procedure, and be reimbursed by their home government. He said that reimbursement amounts were the equivalent of what a government would have paid to have the procedure provided locally.
“Not only would this benefit patients who decide to travel for health care, but it would also benefit those who remain in Canada,“ he said. ”This is due to the fact that patients remaining in Canada for health care would move up a spot on the waiting list each time someone ahead of them chose to travel for health care.”
