The Ontario Government’s proposed solution to the family doctor shortage will only bring about minor changes to the ongoing family doctor crisis.
On Oct. 25, Premier Doug Ford announced that beginning in the fall of 2026, the government will effectively restrict international students from attending medical schools in Ontario. The decision specifically reserves 95 per cent of spots for Ontarian students, with the remaining five per cent for other Canadians.
A health ministry official said that this is not an outright ban on international students, as unfilled spots can be filled by anyone, but this is an unlikely scenario. The same official said that this will be a relatively minor shift in enrollment, as 88 per cent of spots are already held by Ontarians.
Prompting this decision is the shortage of family doctors plaguing the province, with around 2.5 million people without such access, according to the Ontario Medical Association, a number which will only increase in coming years.
Ford has said that he’d like to “get rid” of the international students in Ontario, saying he’s “taking care of our students, our kids first.”
Dr. Cathay Ridson, chair of family medicine at McMaster University says the number of international students in university is “not an issue in Ontario.”
Similarly, Dr. Peter Tiidus, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences at Brock, said the move won’t make a “huge impact” on the number of graduates that remain in Ontario but instead is “more cosmetic than anything else.”
He said that most international students would likely want to stay in Ontario, and the real cause driving the shortage of family doctors is the “bureaucratic reasons” that prevent foreign-trained doctors from practicing medicine.
“If we want to see real change in the availability of doctors in Canada and Ontario […] a more effective approach is to allow ways in which these individuals — who are Canadian, who want to come back to practice medicine in Canada, been educated outside the country and other foreign doctors who have the appropriate education — to speed up the ability for them to actually become practitioners here,” Tiidus said.
Tiidus said the current system has many hoops that doctors need to jump through, including the difficulty associated with finding residencies and clinical placements. “Anything that can be done to make that easier and encourage them to return, and many of them do want to return, would make a significant impact on our situation,” Tiidus said.
The decision would likely not affect Brock, Tiidus said, as they are not a medical school and the number of international students in their programs is “modest,” but in terms of the greater effect, the decision would only have “minor effects.”
Mabrukah Abdulmalik, a third-year international Medical Science student at Brock, echoed Tiidus’ opinion on the minor effect this would have on Brock students but said she was concerned about the rhetoric surrounding the decision.
“A few of the quotes I saw used in the news I read have connotations that I would say are negative and anti-immigration. Especially with the percentage of international students in medical school, which to my knowledge is not high at all,” she said.
Abdulmalik was concerned, however, with how the decision would affect the international students in Brock’s Med Plus program.
The extent of these changes, whether major or minor, will be determined in 2026.