Almost all doctors in Canada support moving to pan-Canadian licensing: survey

National pharmacare would make this very simple.

This move would be good for individual doctors but there several obvious questions that arise:

1. Why wouldn’t doctors in Atlantic Canada leave for Ontario and BC? I knew a doctor who literally dreamt of working in Mississauga.

2. What standard would be adopted? A highly onerous one like Ontario where they want to see your holy communion cert or a less onerous one like those in Atlantic Canada. If the higher standard is taken, fewer foreigners will bother with Atlantic Canada at all.

Of course getting a licence is less than half the battle - they’d still have to find jobs - but I could see a brain drain on this one.

1. The collage of the province in question is the be all end all arbiter of who can practice in their jurisdiction. No change would happen here.

2. No standards would be change. Regional Heath authorities integrity would still be sacrosanct. This does have issues clearly, one areas best practice may not even be used in another but it's the patch quilt setup we have had since the inception of the health act.

We have been stealing Doctors from other provinces and other countries for decades now, poaching isn't going to stop. The system is hemorrhaging trained staff but getting the provinces to all sign off on a plan of action is like herding cats.

We need the colleges to loosen the standards for enrollment and that is only going to happen if the provinces are ok with that with a larger deal. Not just chipping away at the edges, a real plan. However we have a Mexican standoff between the feds and the provinces.

At the moment the regulations in each province still have some differences. You could be eligible in one province and ineligible in another. This applies especially to international medical graduates. IMO the standard may not be that different but the amount of paperwork required certainly is - the Ontario College loves the paper and makes licensing extremely onerous. I will be very curious as to how this will be implemented in practice given the resistance of the Colleges to change over the last 30 years. We should come back to it in a year and see how much progress has actually been made.