A midwife from Scotland, Gilchrist has over a decade of experience working in the UK, and was actively working in Victoria, B.C., but now faces imminent deportation. The reason? Basically, Immigration Canada (IRCC) thinks she can’t speak English. Setting aside the obvious fact that Gilchrist is a native English speaker, she actually wrote and passed a proficiency test, but delayed uploading the results because the IRCC website never gave her an option to do so.
While B.C. Health Minister Josie Osborne has finally (after months of inaction) contacted the federal immigration minister for assistance, the vacuum already created by Gilchrist’s inability to work highlights a much bigger issue facing our health-care system. Simply put, Canada is facing a significant shortage of maternal care workers—and data suggests mothers and newborns are already paying the price.
The journey through pregnancy and childbirth involves a number of health-care professionals: family doctors, nurses, anesthetists, and emergency care physicians, among others. However, an important measure of any health-care system’s ability to provide maternal care is the availability of midwives and obstetrician-gynecologists (OB-GYNs).
Midwives like Heather are typically primary-care providers for low-risk pregnancies but may also work in hospitals on the day of delivery. According to data from the OECD, Canada ranks last among 23 countries for licensed midwives per capita.
While troubling, this may not necessarily be a problem as some countries rely to a greater extent on OB-GYNs—i.e., specialist physicians usually involved in higher-risk pregnancies. However, data from the OECD indicate that Canada also ranks nearly last (33rd of 35) for the relative availability of obstetricians and gynecologists combined. In other words, Canada has a relative shortage of both midwives and OB-GYNs.
Worse, many of the OB-GYNs we do have are resigning—sometimes en masse—in protest due to potentially unsafe work conditions that render them “unable to continue with in-hospital care.” One example of the consequences of staffing shortages is the story of Danielle Goward, a first-time mother who was transferred between four hospitals in British Columbia with a span of 12 days.
While few studies have documented the direct connection between the relative availability of maternal care workers and outcomes in Canada specifically, broad measures of mortality related to childbirth are not encouraging.
For example, a study I conducted for the Fraser Institute previously found Canada had significantly higher infant and perinatal mortality compared to the average high-income universal health-care country in 2021. And more recent data indicate that maternal mortality in Canada has worsened significantly over the last 10 years, growing from 5.5 deaths per thousand live births in 2011–13 to 9.6 in 2021–23. By contrast, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland are half our nation’s rate and Ireland and Iceland are effectively zero. Of course, a variety of factors may contribute to these mortality rates, including rural settings, environmental factors, genetics, etc., but the trend is disturbing.
Canada’s health-care challenges are of course not restricted to maternal care. There is increasing documentation of inadequate health-care workers system-wide, long wait times for scheduled care, and routine emergency room closures—all this while Canada continues to spend more on health care per person than the average developed country in the OECD.
Clearly, our once-lauded health-care system is collapsing and in need of significant reform. However, the focus so far has been largely on increasing the relative availability of family doctors. While these efforts should continue, other aspects of our health-care system that may be less visible—like maternal care—deserve attention, sometimes with even greater urgency.
Instead of putting up roadblocks for qualified and experienced workers like Heather Gilchrist, the government should be rolling out the red carpet for them.
Bacchus Barua is research director at the think-tank SecondStreet.org.
This column was originally published in The Epoch Times on April 1, 2026.
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