The country’s medical schools turn away more than 1,000 Canadian doctors trained abroad annually, even though the country is facing a physician shortage. But they still manage to find residency spots for foreign nationals who are much less likely to stay and help chip away at the physician deficit.
You need Canadian med students to fill Canadian residencies, so medical schools need the resources to expand their intake, which relies both on convincing many conservative provincial governments to provide more funding to keep the already exorbitant tuition at a similar level, and having more people willing to teach in med school, which often means giving up some of their practice.
In my opinion, there is a vast supply of people who want to become doctors, but the very limited spots that med schools have lead them to create extremely obtrusive barriers to entry to limit their intake to who they think are the best, the succes of which is questionable at best.
It’s fairly clear that standardized tests aren’t an indicator of success in a profession, even grades at the undergraduate level can arguably be said to be an indication of how well one is at test writing. Intake, at least at the university near me, is also based on an in-person interview with poor scoring metrics, often conducted by later year med students or residents rather than practicing doctors.
I don’t think the issue is a multitude of rich foreigners essentially paying for residency spots. The system is so dysfunctional they wouldn’t even know where to send the money. Look to where the journey of becoming a doctor starts, and you’ll find universities with limited resources using outdated intake practices to artificially limit the ones they accept into medical school, creating a bottleneck right at the very start of the process. There aren’t a lot of Canadian graduates going unmatched to residencies, there are a lot of residencies open to foreign grads because we don’t produce enough Canadian grads to fill them.