Family physician Dr. Robert O’Connor, of Metchosin, B.C., joins a demonstration in Victoria in 2022 advocating for more doctors in the province.CHAD HIPOLITO/GM
The University of British Columbia School of Medicine opened in 1950, with a cohort of 60 students. (It now has 328 first-year students.)
B.C.’s population then was 1.1 million. Today, B.C. is home to 5.7 million people, and the province finally has a second medical school.
The Simon Fraser University Stephens Family School of Medicine has just opened its doors, with an inaugural cohort of 48 students.
The new school has a number of notable characteristics. First and foremost, the curriculum will focus on family medicine and primary care. It will also place the emphasis on hands-on training over classroom teaching. Medical students usually spend up to 70 per cent of their clinical training in hospitals, and 30 per cent in community settings like clinics. SFU is planning to flip that ratio to 70 per cent in the community, and 30 per cent in hospitals.
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Much of the teaching will happen in the community, including in rural and remote areas, and Indigenous communities. This is designed not only to expose students to various practice settings, but to entice them to work there. (Physician shortages are far more acute in remote and rural areas, and research shows physicians are far more likely to settle where they do their training.)
This “distributed, community-engaged learning model” is similar to the innovative approach taken by the Northern Ontario School of Medicine when it opened in 2005.
The MD program at Simon Fraser will last three years, while most Canadian medical schools offer four-year degrees. The core curriculum is the same, but three-year students have much shorter summer holidays and fewer opportunities for electives.
The new medical school is located in multicultural, suburban Surrey, another deliberate choice. SFU says it is “committed to training future physicians in the community, for the community, and with the community.”
Finally, the Stephens Family School of Medicine is one of the few medical schools that is “named,” showing the growing role of philanthropy in funding higher education. Ratana and Arran Stephens, founders of the organic food giant Nature’s Path, gifted $40-million to the school that bears their name.
Canada now has 19 medical schools, and more are on the way.
Toronto Metropolitan University last year opened a campus in Brampton, Ont., with a large cohort of 94 students.
From top: Philanthropists Ratana Stephens and Arran Stephens have turned their Nature’s Path wealth into a $40-million donation to SFU’s new medical school.Jennilee Marigomen
York University, the University of PEI and the Université de Québec network all have plans to open medical schools. Existing medical schools are also expanding their programs outside of their big-city campuses. For example, Queen’s has a family medicine program in Ontario’s Durham region and the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George operates a Northern Medical Program in conjunction with UBC.
This flurry of educational activity is all in response to Canada’s rather dire lack of access to primary care.
An estimated 5.9 million adults in Canada lack regular access to a primary-care provider, such as a family doctor or nurse practitioner, according to findings from the OurCare National Survey published in December, 2025.
No matter how many new doctors medical schools crank out, it’s not going to quickly resolve this issue. Between med school, residency and specialty training, it can take six to 12 years to train a full-fledged medical practitioner.
Canada has one of the lowest number of physicians per capita among wealthy countries – about 2.8 doctors per 1,000 population – compared to the OECD average of 3.9.
We have fewer doctors than Britain and Austria, but more than the U.S. and Japan.
That should serve a caution that you can’t look at these numbers in isolation. Doctors are just one part of the health care puzzle.
What matters too is how they practise, and where they practise.
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In Canada, the bureaucratic burden on doctors is onerous. They spend a lot of time pushing paper around that could be better spent on clinical care.
Family physicians in particular tend to operate as small businesses, and depend on fee-for-service payments. The future of medicine is more interdisciplinary care and more flexible pay models – and we’re not keeping up.
Canada is also highly dependent on recruiting physicians from other countries. About one-third of family doctors and one-quarter of specialists were trained outside Canada. Yet, we still create a lot of barriers to the licensing of international medical graduates.
All this to say that, while the expansion of medical education in Canada is welcome, profound structural changes are needed if these new doctors aren’t going to just be tossed into the meat grinder.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly described Simon Fraser University medical students’ training. Students currently spend up to 70 per cent of their clinical training in hospitals, and 30 per cent in community settings like clinics. SFU is planning to flip that ratio to 70 per cent in the community, and 30 per cent in hospitals. This version has been updated.