At least 15,474 Canadians died in 2023-24 alone before receiving various surgeries or diagnostic scans. The true number is likely double At least 15,0

More than 74,000 Canadians have died on health-care wait lists since 2018: report

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2025-01-16 02:30:02

At least 15,474 Canadians died in 2023-24 alone before receiving various surgeries or diagnostic scans. The true number is likely double

At least 15,000 Canadians died while waiting for surgery or a diagnostic scan over the course of a year, according to government data collected by public policy think tank SecondStreet.org.

The true figure for the fiscal year 2023-24 is likely nearly double owing to a “huge hole” in the data, said SecondStreet president Colin Craig. Missing are data from Quebec, Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador and most of Manitoba.

The government health bodies that did respond to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests represent 62 per cent of the population. “If the findings from the provinces that did give us data are extrapolated across provinces that didn’t, the total rises to closer to 28,000 people,” Craig said.

The report is the latest “Died on a Waiting List” policy brief from SecondStreet since the conservative-leaning organization began tracking wait-list deaths in the spring of 2018. Since then, the think tank has counted 74,677 cases where Canadians passed away while waiting for treatments. These range from potentially life-saving ones, such as heart operations or cancer therapy, to life-enhancing ones, such as cataract surgeries and hip replacements.