Mr. Speaker, we have a medical manpower crisis in Canada. As we age, our need for nurses, technicians and physicians will increase.
However, for physicians in training, although enrolment in medical schools has increased somewhat, the number of residency positions has not. This is disastrous as it will worsen the shortage of fully trained doctors, especially specialists; waste money in training students who cannot practice; and will lead our medical students to move to the United States to complete their training where they too often remain after finishing their training, contributing to the southern brain drain.
We urgently need more residency positions in Canada to ensure that we will have an adequate number of physicians in the future.
Compounding this crisis is the fact that as we age so too does our physician population. Unless this situation is remedied now, Canadians will be unable to get the medical care they need in the future, and in this, we all lose.