TORONTO – 23,746 deaths, including 10,634 in Ontario, 6,290 in Quebec, and 4,620 in British Columbia. This isn’t a war report, and perhaps it’s even worse, given that we’re talking about patients who were on waiting lists for surgery or diagnostic procedures. In a healthcare system worthy of any civilized country, they would have been operated on and/or treated promptly; in Canada, instead, the wait for the surgery/treatment was so long that, in the end, they died. 

A new report from the public policy think tank SecondStreet.org (here) paints this disturbing picture. It’s based on data from a series of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests submitted to over forty provincial and territorial health agencies. These are official data, therefore, provided by the hospitals themselves.

The data reveals that at least (at the very least, given that data from some provinces is partial and Alberta and certain areas of Manitoba have not provided any) — as we said, at least 23,746 patients died in Canada while waiting for surgery or diagnostic procedures between April 2024 and March 2025, a 3% increase over the previous year. Indeed, this isn’t even news, given that the total number of waiting list deaths reported from 2018 to this year has surpassed 100,000.

Behind the statistics are the lives of Canadians like Debbie Fewster, a mother of three and grandmother of ten, who was told in July 2024 that she would need heart surgery within three weeks. But more than two months later, she died: she was still awaiting the procedure when her heart stopped beating on Thanksgiving Day. Her death, like that of many others, became public only because her family spoke out, and similar stories have emerged across the country, such as those of 19-year-old Laura Hillier of Manitoba and 16-year-old Finlay van der Werken of Ontario, who died while awaiting treatment.

Even more incredible is that, at $244 billion, public health spending from 2024 to 2025 has reached an all-time high, with per capita spending tripling to $5,943 since the mid-1990s. Canada is thus one of the world’s biggest spenders on healthcare, but this high spending has not translated into improved performance, states the SecondStreet.org’s report. Indeed, deaths of patients on waiting lists are increasing year after year, while in other healthcare systems, such as those in Europe, “the idea of ​​patients dying on waiting lists” is “a foreign concept,” the report emphasizes, and “this finding suggests that with European-style health reform, patient suffering in Canada could be greatly reduced…”.

The complete report, extremely interesting and enlightening on the real and effective state of healthcare in Canada, can be downloaded and/or consulted clicking here: Policy-Brief-Died-on-a-Waiting-List-2025-Edition

Image from SecondStreet.org