The Ford government made a big splashy campaign-style announcement yesterday that it would be slashing the number of out-of-province students attending Ontario's six medical schools, with 95% of the spots being reserved for Ontario students.
This is clearly Doug Ford jumping on the runaway bandwagon of Pierre Poilievre's anti-immigrant sentiment. Ford said in the announcement that he had been told that 18% of Ontario's college and university students were international students, although it later transpired that that figure relates to graduate students, and is anyway nothing to do with medical sudents in particular.
The thing is, only 0.3% of undergraduate medical students in Ontario are actually international students. This amounts to all of 11 students out of 3,732 in the academic year 2022-23, and three of those were from the US. This number for 2023-24 was down to 10. Three of the six Ontario medical schools had no foreign students at all.
Granted, about 12% of medical school students were from other Canadian provinces, and this would be capped at 5% under Ford's new rules, but I'm not sure that is what Ford's supporters would have gleaned from the announcement (nor am I sure that is a problem that necessarily needs fixing).
Either way, none of this is going to address in any meaningful way Ontario's housing crises or the family medicine doctors shortage (which in fact, might get slightly worse as a result of this announcement). What we really need is more medical schools, and more money pumped into the training system (although, to be fair, two new medical schools, at Toronto Metropolitan University amd York University, have been separately announced).
But, anyway, Ford got some useful sound-bites and media coverage out of it.
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