23,746 Canadians died on medical wait lists in 2024-25, up 3% -- and it explains the outbound-patient exodus

At least 23,746 patients died while registered on a Canadian wait list for surgery or a diagnostic scan during the 2024-25 fiscal year, according to a November 2025 policy brief from SecondStreet.org, a Canadian public-policy think tank — a 3% increase over the prior year among the health authorities that reported comparable data both years, and part of a cumulative total of 100,876 such deaths the organization has tallied since it began tracking in April 2018.¹ The figure comes from Freedom of Information requests to provincial health authorities, not from any government body that publishes this number on its own — no Canadian government agency, at any level, routinely reports how many patients die while on a wait list.¹² That gap in official reporting is also why the real total is almost certainly higher than 23,746: Alberta provided no data at all for the current year, part of Manitoba's figures are missing, and most provinces don't track deaths among patients waiting for a specialist appointment rather than a scheduled procedure.¹

What this number does and doesn't show

The single most important thing to understand about the 23,746 figure is also the thing most likely to get lost when it's cited: it counts patients who died while on a wait list, not patients whose deaths were caused by the wait. As one independent analysis of the SecondStreet data puts it, a patient waiting for a knee replacement who dies of an unrelated illness is still counted in that total — the data "does not prove causation," and SecondStreet itself does not claim that it does.² No Canadian government body tracks wait-list mortality in a way that would let anyone verify causation at scale; the one narrow exception is organ transplants, where the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) does track deaths among patients waiting for a transplant specifically, because transplant waiting-list mortality is a recognized, actively monitored clinical outcome in a way that a hip-replacement wait list is not.² None of this makes the 23,746 figure meaningless — it's real data on real people who died while the health system had them queued for care — but it means the number describes the scale of Canada's wait lists, not a body count directly attributable to those wait lists.

What the breakdown actually contains

Within the total, the report's provincial detail gives some sense of where the deaths are concentrated. Ontario alone recorded 355 deaths among patients waiting for cardiac surgery or procedures, with at least 90 of those occurring after the patient had already waited past the province's own clinical target wait time.¹ Recorded wait durations before death ranged enormously — from under a week to nearly nine years — reflecting that the tally spans everything from urgent cardiac cases to lower-acuity procedures like cataract surgery where a long wait is common but any single death is far less likely to be wait-related.¹ SecondStreet's president, Colin Craig, has specifically flagged cataract surgery as one of the largest single categories behind these numbers in provinces like Saskatchewan — not because cataract delays are typically fatal, but because cataract wait lists are so large that even a low per-patient mortality rate produces a meaningful raw count.³

A province-level example: Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan's own year-over-year data illustrates both the trend and the political fight over what it means. The province recorded more than 400 wait-list deaths in 2022-23, up from 343 the year before — a jump of more than 15%.³ Saskatchewan's Health Minister, Everett Hindley, attributed the spike to a pandemic-era surgical backlog that peaked around 2021 at roughly 35,000 people on the waiting list, while the province's NDP health critic, Aleana Young, pointed to the government's own claimed spending increases and asked directly what its plan was if money wasn't the constraint.³ Saskatchewan has spent at least five times more per capita on healthcare since 1993, now exceeding $5,500 annually per person — a reminder that in this debate, rising deaths on wait lists and rising healthcare spending are not mutually exclusive facts, and citing one without the other doesn't settle what's actually driving the trend.³

The official data confirms wait times are getting worse, without confirming why

Separately from SecondStreet's mortality tracking, CIHI's own 2026 wait-times report — using standard government data rather than FOI requests — confirms that wait times themselves have been worsening on several fronts, even though CIHI doesn't track deaths. Emergency department wait times increased between 2018-19 and 2024-25, alongside patients arriving with more urgent conditions and longer total ED stays, particularly for older patients, those with chronic conditions, and those ultimately admitted.⁴ Among scheduled procedures, joint replacements and cataract surgery have returned to roughly pre-pandemic wait levels, but cancer surgery and diagnostic imaging remain slower than before the pandemic — and CIHI attributes part of the broader slowdown to limited hospital bed availability, compounded by long-term-care and community-support shortages that delay discharging patients and free up beds further upstream.⁴

The connection to Canada's outbound medical-tourism numbers

This isn't a standalone data point — it's the mortality-adjacent half of a trend this site has already covered from the patient-volume side. A separate Fraser Institute study, "Leaving Canada for Medical Care, 2025," estimated that 105,529 Canadians traveled outside the country for medical treatment in 2025, driven by a median wait between referral and treatment of 28.6 weeks — the second-longest such wait ever recorded and more than triple the 1993 baseline.⁵ Read together, the two figures describe the same underlying system from two different angles: tens of thousands of Canadians each year are either leaving the country to get care faster, or remaining on a domestic wait list long enough that some number of them — a number no government body will name, but one SecondStreet's FOI requests put at nearly 24,000 in a single year — die before their turn comes up.

The bottom line

The 23,746 figure is genuine, sourced, and worth taking seriously as a measure of how many people are dying with unfulfilled care still pending — but it is not, and does not claim to be, a count of deaths that timely care would have prevented. Both of those things can be true at once, and the honest version of this story holds them together rather than picking the more dramatic half: Canada's wait lists are real, growing in several categories according to Canada's own health-data agency, resulting in a documented and rising number of deaths among patients still on those lists — while the actual share of those deaths that a shorter wait would have prevented remains, by design of the available data, unmeasured.

Footnotes

1. https://secondstreet.org/2025/11/26/23746-patients-died-on-waitlists-in-past-year/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. https://imfounder.com/politics/public-policy/deaths-canada-medical-wait-lists-data-fact-check/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. https://globalnews.ca/news/10153232/saskatchewan-sees-increase-in-surgical-waitlist-deaths-in-2022-2023/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. https://www.cihi.ca/en/wait-times-in-canada-2026 ↩ ↩²

5. https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/more-than-105-000-canadians-estimated-to-have-left-canada-for-medical-treatment-last-year-859555648.html ↩

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