HORROR: Canada’s Hidden Healthcare Death Toll: 23,746 Lives Lost on Wait-Lists
Freedom-of-information requests uncover the lives lost while governments stay silent.
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Canada’s healthcare horror story isn’t fiction, it’s documented in FOI records showing 23,746 deaths in a single year from patients trapped on wait-lists.
A system that lets people die in line is not broken, it’s deadly by design, and provinces are still withholding data to keep the real total buried.
FOI requests expose the staggering human cost of bureaucratic inaction, revealing numbers the public was never meant to see.
By The Post Millennial November 26, 2025
Canada recorded at least 23,746 patient deaths while individuals were waiting for surgeries or diagnostic procedures between April 2024 and March 2025, according to a new report from public policy group SecondStreet.org.
The figure marks a three percent increase over the previous year and brings the total number of reported wait-list deaths since 2018 to more than 100,000, CTV News reports.
The organization compiled the data using freedom-of-information requests submitted to more than 40 provincial and territorial health agencies. Several jurisdictions released only partial numbers, while Alberta and areas of Manitoba provided none.
As a result, the report states the true national total is likely higher. “No government reports publicly on patients dying on waiting lists,” said SecondStreet.org president Colin Craig.
Ontario reported the highest number of deaths at 10,634, including more than 9,100 cases involving patients who died before receiving or being scheduled for surgery. Quebec recorded 6,290 deaths, while British Columbia reported 4,620. Other provinces reported smaller totals ranging from 121 in New Brunswick to 727 in Nova Scotia. Manitoba listed 215 deaths, though the data set was incomplete.
The report includes multiple examples of patients who died while waiting for care. It highlights the case of Manitoba resident Debbie Fewster, who was advised in July 2024 that she required heart surgery within three weeks. She waited more than two months and died on Thanksgiving Day. Similar cases were previously documented in Ontario and Alberta.
SecondStreet.org notes many of the deaths occurred among patients waiting for procedures aimed at improving quality of life—such as hip and knee replacements, cataract surgeries, and MRIs.
A significant portion involved potentially life-saving interventions, including cardiac care and cancer-related treatment. Ontario’s cardiac data showed 355 deaths among patients awaiting heart procedures, at least 90 of whom waited beyond recommended timelines.
Despite record levels of health spending, $244 billion from 2024 to 2025, with per-capita funding nearly triple that of the mid-1990s—the report argues system performance has not improved. It cites research indicating Canada continues to have fewer doctors, hospital beds, and MRI machines per capita than comparable universal health-care systems.
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I'm in Montreal. The figures must me far worse. It's weird how people need more med interventions/pills since 2021 - Gee, I wonder why... We don't count MAID applicants, (the ciriterias keep widening) ; Add to this: when an elderly person sets foot in the hospital, this person will go downhill fast and never come back home. The point is also to deflect patients to the private med sector (available to the rich or privileged class with good insurance plans). Clearly, if you are poor and/or old, the Canadian gov wants you dead.
Meanwhile, here in the USA, people die when insurance company clerks blandly inform them that sorry, that procedure or medication is not covered. and, IMO, when "artificial intelligence" (what a f**cked-up name for a program written for an insurance company) takes over from clerks, things are not going to get better for victims. And hospitals are recompensed grandly for administering deadly procedures and drugs. And doctors take bribes to give patients drugs, pretty much using people as lab rats. And drugstores now have employees who second guess doctors on prescriptions, and can cancel or change them. And so on. Like The Running Man, sort of, trying to get through a deadly gauntlet in order to win health care. That was actually the original premise, a drug for a sick daughter, I seem to remember.
This is not to say Canada is better - I am saying it looks to me like health care systems all over the world are now designed to sell drugs and expensive procedures and/or deny those things deliberately and just let people die.
I wonder if Bernie is still busing people to Canada for cheaper drugs, or was that just a campaign stunt. I hear buses are free now! Hope nobody takes their support ostrich, though, looks like the way Canada deals with ostriches is to herd them together and have a shooting party, mowing them down.