Canada’s health-care system is collapsing—and more money isn’t going to fix it. Long before the pandemic, patients endured some of the longest wait times for medically necessary care in the developed world. At the same time Canadians footed one of the largest bills for a universal health-care system. And things have only gotten worse.

Data collected over the past 30 years reveals a steady deterioration in access, with the median wait from referral to treatment increasing 124 per cent from 9.3 weeks in 1993 to 20.9 weeks in 2019, before the pandemic. Since then, wait times have further increased to an unprecedented 27.4 weeks in 2022,