If you wouldn't mind, Dr. Lemire, I will.
There are multiple parts to that question, of course. The IMG assessment programs that I'm familiar with are provincial, so there's certainly provincial responsibility there. One obvious structural barrier is that after a certain number of years of not practising in Canada, IMGs are, to my understanding, generally not eligible to enter retraining and assessment programs.
To your second point around protectionism, I'm willing to acknowledge that this may be happening. We are so desperately short of family physicians—where I practice and everywhere that I've heard from colleagues—that I can't see anything but welcoming arms to have additional colleagues, foreign-trained or not, working in our communities.
I would be remiss if I didn't reiterate Dr. Lefebvre's point as well about the ethics of making it perhaps too easy to immigrate and practice in Canada. There are a lot of resources that go into training a physician. Perhaps there are some ethical issues in bringing them from overseas, where the effort has been put into training them.