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.

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 more scarce 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.