ER doctor warns foreign worker cuts will affect hospital wait times and patient outcomes

Dr. Bernard Ho discusses what impact cuts to the federal temporary foreign worker program will have on the already stretched-thin health-care system.

An emergency room physician warns that Canada’s plan to slash the number of temporary foreign workers will have serious consequences for the country’s overburdened health-care system.

“They play a pretty outsized role in our health-care system and I am concerned that with these cuts we’re going to see exacerbation of some of these staff shortages that we’re seeing across the country,” Dr. Bernard Ho from Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto told CTV’s Your Morning on Monday. “We need to start training Canadians now to fill those gaps.”

Canada’s 2026-28 Immigration Levels Plan, which was released last week, slashed the target for new temporary foreign workers to 60,000 in 2026.

That’s down from a previous target of 82,000 – a number that will be cut again to 50,000 in both 2027 and 2028. The Temporary Foreign Worker Program allows employers to fill labour gaps when qualified Canadians are not available.

“With fewer temporary foreign workers coming in under the program, health-care employers will have a smaller pool of staff available,” Dr. Ho explained.

“And so health-care facilities will need to rely more on the cost of agency staff, pay more overtime or reduce services, like less homecare visits, or less access to long-term care beds. You know, these pressures will quickly trickle down to patients in terms of wait times, continuity of care and ultimately patient outcomes will be affected.”

According to the latest Statistics Canada data, Canada’s health-care system employed 57,500 temporary foreign workers in 2022 – up from just 3,200 in 2000.

In 2022, temporary foreign workers made up 7.9 per cent of the total workforce in home health-care services, 4.9 per cent of the workforce in nursing and residential care facilities, three per cent of the workforce in ambulatory health-care services and 1.2 per cent of the workforce in hospitals.

To help fill gaps in sectors like health care, the federal government recently announced the creation of a $97-million Foreign Credential Recognition Action Fund to help foreign-trained professionals find jobs in their field faster.

Ho says while this is a “good step,” it should also be accompanied by more health-care sector training for Canadians.

“These workers fill real gaps in a very overstretched system and there isn’t really a pool of trained Canadians ready to fill these gaps in a moment’s notice,” he cautioned.

“If you want to rely less on temporary programs we need parallel investment in training and retention and in fair immigration pathways, but all of these measures take time, and so cutting the supply pipeline without simultaneously filling the gaps doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”