Canadians are losing millions of hours of productivity and billions of dollars in income while stuck on waitlists for medically necessary treatments.
A new report from the Fraser Institute estimates the private costs borne by individuals waiting in increasingly long queues for essential care.
In 2024, the average wait time from referral by a general practitioner to receiving treatment has grown to 30 weeks—up from the previous year. The wait time between seeing a specialist and getting treatment now averages 15 weeks.
As the number of Canadians waiting for care rose to 1.54 million in 2024, the total time spent waiting reached 31.1 million weeks, up from 24.1 million in 2023.
Based on the Canadian community health survey, the report also estimates that 13.2 per cent of Canadians were adversely affected in their daily lives by their wait for non-emergency surgery, contributing to serious loss in economic productivity.
The financial toll is steep: lost wage earnings for those on waiting lists totalled an estimated $5.2 billion or $3,364 per capita, up from $3.5 billion in 2023. The top provinces in lost per capita wage earnings are Prince Edward Island at $6,592, New Brunswick at $6,210, and Quebec at $4,216.
For each individual adversely affected in their wait for non-emergency surgery, the economic cost is roughly $25,487.
The report emphasizes that this is only a conservative estimate of the economic cost of waiting for care, as it does not take into consideration the value of non-working hours and the sacrifices that family members make to support the ailing individual.
“Valuing all hours of the week, including evenings and weekends but excluding eight hours of sleep per night, at the average hourly wage would increase the estimated cost of waiting to almost $15.9 billion or about $10,226 per person,” reads the report.
“The costs of care provided by family members (in time spent caring for the individual waiting for treatment) and their lost productivity due to difficulty or mental anguish, are not valued in this estimate.”
Lost wages are not the only cost borne by healthcare waitlists.
The think tank SecondStreet estimates that between April 2023 and March 2024, 15,474 Canadians died while waiting for healthcare on a waitlist, excluding the provinces of Quebec, Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador, and most of Manitoba. SecondStreet estimates that the actual number is likely over 28,000.
The think tank also found that 47 per cent of Canadians forgo visiting a healthcare provider to avoid dealing with overwhelming wait times.