(LifeSiteNews) — Over 100,000 Canadians sought medical care outside of the country last year as Liberals continue to prioritize assisted suicide over actual health care, according to a new report.
On January 13, the Fraser Institute published results from a survey of physicians across Canada, which found that 105,529 Canadians sought healthcare outside the country, amid month-long wait times to receive care in Canada.
“Clearly, the number of Canadians who ultimately receive their medical care in other countries is not insignificant,” the Fraser Institute concluded. “That a considerable number of Canadians travelled abroad and paid to escape the well-known failings of the Canadian health-care system speaks volumes about how well the system is working for them.”
The survey questioned doctors from 12 major medical specialties: plastic surgery, gynecology, ophthalmology, general surgery, neurosurgery, orthopedic surgery, cardiovascular surgery, urology, internal medicine, radiation oncology, and medical oncology.
According to estimates for 2025, about 2.1 percent of Canadian patients received non-emergency medical care outside the country. Among the provinces, Alberta had the highest rate, with physicians reporting that 3.0 percent of their patients sought treatment abroad. In contrast, Newfoundland and Labrador recorded the lowest proportion, at just 0.8 percent of patients traveling overseas for care.
“An estimated 105,529 Canadians received non-emergency medical treatment outside Canada,” the results stated.
“In some cases, these patients may have needed to leave Canada due to a lack of available resources or a lack of appropriate procedures or technologies. In others, their departure may have been driven by a desire to return more quickly to their lives, to seek out superior quality care, or perhaps to save their own lives or avoid the risk of disability,” it continued.
These numbers come just a month after data found that, on average, Canadians must wait 28.6 weeks to receive a referral from a family doctor for serious treatment. These figures have tripled over the past 30 years.
The increased wait times are leading some Canadians to despair and opt for assisted suicide instead of waiting for medical aid. At the same time, sick and elderly Canadians who have refused to end their lives have reported being called “selfish” by their providers.
In one case, an Ontario doctor revealed that a middle-aged worker, whose ankle and back injuries had left him unable to work, felt that the government’s insufficient support was “leaving (him) with no choice but to pursue” euthanasia.
Other cases included an obese woman who described herself as a “useless body taking up space,” which one doctor argued met the requirements for assisted suicide because obesity is “a medical condition which is indeed grievous and irremediable.”
At the same time, as LifeSiteNews previously reported, over 23,000 Canadians have died while on waitlists for medical care as Liberals have focused on euthanasia expansions.
The Liberal government has worked to expand euthanasia 13-fold since it was legalized, making it the fastest growing euthanasia program in the world. Meanwhile, Health Canada has released a series of studies on advance requests for assisted suicide.
As LifeSiteNews reported in December, so-called “Medical Assistance in Dying” was responsible for more than five percent of all deaths in Canada in 2024.
At the same time, internal documents from Ontario doctors in 2024 revealed Canadians are choosing euthanasia because of poverty and loneliness, not as a result of an alleged terminal illness.
