EDITORIAL: Canada’s health care isn’t free or the best

Report shows Canadians spent $399 billion on health care last year or $9,626 per person

Published Jul 27, 2026  •  2 minute read

For decades in Canada, two great myths persisted about our health-care system — that it was free and that it was the best in the world. Photo by Adobe Stock

For decades in Canada, two great myths persisted about our health-care system — that it was free and that it was the best in the world.

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Today, it is demonstrably neither.

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According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, Canadians spent $399 billion on health care last year, $9,626 per Canadian, mostly paid through their taxes.

Among the 38 developed countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Canada spends 11.2% of its GDP on health care, among a group of higher-spending countries including the U.K. (11%), Sweden (11.3%) and France (11.5%).

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Wait times remain stagnant

Despite this, international studies of Canada’s health-care system, which is administered by the provinces with the federal government responsible for ensuring universality, portability, public administration, comprehensiveness and accessibility, consistently find Canada has some of the longest medical wait times in the developed world.

As the C.D. Howe Institute reported last year, “in international comparisons with its peers (an annual survey by the Commonwealth Fund of 10 comparable countries) Canada ranks ninth out of 10” and dead last in timeliness of care.

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Canada fares better for those who succeed in getting access to the system, but millions of Canadians are denied access because they don’t have a family doctor, who are the gatekeepers to medicare, many of whom are baby boomers and now retiring.

Provincial premiers at their annual meeting last week appealed to Prime Minister Mark Carney to restore federal funding to 50% of the total cost of health care — currently at 22%.

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Federal governments of all stripes have rejected that for decades, saying they lowered federal taxes to give the provinces more room to increase theirs in the 1970s, ignoring the reality that there’s only one taxpayer.

Now the premiers are warning that health-care funding could go over a “fiscal cliff” because a number of 10-year targeted funding deals from the feds to the provinces will expire in March 2027.

The real issue is why are Canadians paying top dollar through their taxes for a mediocre health-care system and why do comparable countries such as the Netherlands, U.K., France, Australia, Germany and Switzerland (excluding the U.S., which does not have universal health care) have better health-care outcomes?

Isn’t it time to find out?

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