2026-08-17 from fraserinstitute.org

British Columbia’s health-care system is broken. In 2025, the latest year of available data, B.C. patients faced a median wait of 32.2 weeks from GP referral to specialist treatment, the longest in the province since 1993 (when estimates were first published). And this measure doesn’t include the wait to see a GP in the first place, assuming you have one.

But there’s good news—solutions are available, they just require political will.

For starters, the Eby government should expand the use of private clinics to deliver publicly-funded surgeries. When Saskatchewan used private clinics (alongside other reforms), the median wait time in that province dropped from one of the longest in Canada (outside the Atlantic provinces) at 26.5 weeks in 2010 to one of the shortest at 14.2 weeks by 2014, the second-shortest that year (only Ontario had a shorter median wait). 

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