Canada’s doctor shortage, largely driven by population growth through immigration, is becoming increasingly acute. This situation is being exacerbated by the foreign visa trainee program, which allows medical schools to allocate residency spots to foreign nationals.
Doctors are required to compete for scarce residency spots before being licensed to practice. Because Canadian medical schools prioritize their own graduates for these rare spots, around 1,000 Canadians who studied medicine abroad are turned away every year.
At the same time, there is an increasing number of foreign visa trainees taking up residency spots in Canada – almost all of whom intend to return to their home countries immediately afterwards. In 2019, 87 foreign nationals were given residency spots. In 2022, 148 were given spots, a 70% increase in just three years. As of last year, 727 residency spots were occupied by foreign nationals.
Why are Canadian medical schools giving residencies to foreigners who intend to leave after they complete them, rather than Canadians who studied abroad and wish to return? As with similar immigration streams such as the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program, there is a strong profit motive at work.
Foreign visa trainees largely come from oil-rich gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Kuwait. Saudi Arabians, the largest group in the foreign visa trainee program, are sponsored by the Saudi government and the state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco. In return for paying their way, these young Saudi nationals are contractually obligated to return home after their residency.
Saudi Arabia is able to pay more for its foreign visa trainees than what provinces can offer for Canadians in residency spots. The Saudi state even covers the salaries of some Canadian teaching staff. The Gulf monarchy can easily afford it: their Al-Nassr FC soccer club (owned by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund) recently signed a $200 million-per-year deal to buy Cristiano Ronaldo.
How is all of this possible? Under federal law, employers can only bring in a foreign national for a job if they have tried to find a Canadian citizen or permanent resident first. In 2010, however, the Harper government issued Bulletin 230, which exempted medical schools from this requirement.
The Society for Canadians Studying Medicine Abroad (SOCASMA) is calling for Bulletin 230 to be revoked, and for the foreign visa trainee program to be dismantled. President Rosemary Pawliuk has agreed to write a piece on the topic for my online publication, Dominion Review.
In a statement to CBC News, Pawliuk stated the case simply: Canadians “desperate to do the job they were trained to do” are being “sidelined by their own government in favour of people who come from these oil-rich countries”.
As the tragic consequences of the doctor shortage continue to mount, it is high time to put Canadians first, and dismantle the foreign visa trainee program.
Editor’s note: My bi-monthly Counter Current column is originally published in the Islands Marketplace paper (islandsmarketplace.com/issue.pdf).
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