The country’s medical schools turn away more than 1,000 Canadian doctors trained abroad annually, even though the country is facing a physician shortage. But they still manage to find residency spots for foreign nationals who are much less likely to stay and help chip away at the physician deficit.
I think the article falls short in its reasoning. Yes, I agree that Canadian IMGs should have priority over foreign IMGs, but where’s the root of the problem? Why do we have so many Canadian international medical graduates in the first place?
The issue here is not so much with how residency programs rank candidates, and I’d very much like to see a source for Pawliuk’s claim of IMGs paying for residencies, because CaRMS doesn’t work like that, but more because of the lack of Canadian graduates in the first place. Canadian medical schools are extremely exclusive and use outdated evaluation practices to limit their intake to a number that has not increased much at all in the past decade, at least at my local university.
This exclusivity leads to Canadians who want to be doctors to seek medical training elsewhere, as the article mentions. This then makes them an IMG, and the system doesn’t often distinguish between a Canadian or foreign IMG. It’d be up to the residency program itself to prioritize Canadians, but then you’d have to convince the ranking committee to select based on nationality rather than aptitude.
The question we should be asking is not, “why are there so many foreigners in Canadian residencies?” but rather, “why don’t we have more Canadian graduates to fill our own residencies?”