Why We Need National Leadership and Solutions for This National Crisis

On December 22, 2025, 44-year-old Prashanth Sreekumar walked into the emergency department of Grey Nuns Community Hospital in Edmonton complaining of severe chest pain. He waited for more than eight hours and begged for help, but by the time he was finally called to be seen, he collapsed from an apparent cardiac arrest and died right in the hospital waiting area. His wife said she was repeatedly told there were no available doctors, despite his intense pain, a scenario that has left their family and many Canadians both grieving and outraged.

A fundraiser has since been launched to support Prashanth’s wife and three children, and to demand accountability and justice for how a tax-paying Canadian citizen was made to wait so long for lifesaving care.

This Is Not an Isolated Case

Stories like Prashanth’s are not rare. They echo across the country. Here are just a few:

In Nova Scotia, a 37-year-old mother of three, Allison Holthoff, died after waiting six hours in a crowded ER in excruciating pain before she could be seen.

In Ontario, one family says their 16-year-old son, Finlay van der Werken, died after an eight-hour wait for a doctor in an emergency department, a wait so long that they have launched a lawsuit and are calling for laws to set maximum ER wait times for children.

In Québec, there have been reports of people dying while waiting for care in emergency departments. As many as 3,668 patients in six months died in or near ERs in one year because they could not be moved to a bed or seen for treatment.

And these are just some of the reported individual stories, cases that hit media or public inquiries. They are only the tip of a much larger picture.

There are tens of thousands of Canadians who have died waiting for healthcare.

A major report shows that at least 23,746 patients died on healthcare waitlists for surgeries and diagnostic procedures in just one recent year (April 1, 2024, to March 31, 2025).

This figure does not include all provinces, meaning the real number is almost certainly higher.

Other estimates show that nearly 75,000 Canadians have died while waiting for care over the last several years (since 2018–19).

People Don’t Get Seen, and Some Die Waiting

Many patients waiting for heart surgeries, cancer diagnostics, or life-altering procedures simply never make it to the operating room. In one report from Ontario alone, 115 people died in 2023–24 while waiting for cardiac surgery or a cardiac procedure.

As one reader wrote on a post, Canadian healthcare is great—until you need it. Now, that being said, I know many people, including family, who have received great care when they need it, but they are the lucky ones who have access to a family doctor.

The issue is emergency rooms have become a place for general healthcare, as well as a drop-off for people in addictions and mental health crises, and ERs don’t have the resources to manage the volume of these medical issues, which have been exacerbated by a significant increase in population due to an atrocious immigration system.

It’s not just waitlists—ERs themselves have become deadly waiting rooms:

• Some emergency departments report average waits of up to 22 hours just to get a hospital bed.
• Thousands of patients leave emergency rooms without receiving care because the waits are so long and the system is so stretched.
• Research shows that longer ER wait times are associated with higher short-term mortality, meaning the longer people wait, the more likely it is someone will die before care begins.

That’s not just inconvenient—it’s deadly. An experienced mental health worker told me many people (over 40%) who are suicidal and in mental health crisis die after leaving the hospital because they are discharged when they shouldn’t be. They said this isn’t the exception; it’s the rule. The untreated mental health and addiction crisis has seriously burdened our ERs, and there is no plan to address it or fix it. In 2021, when I was elected, then–Health Minister Carolyn Bennett promised $4.5 billion to a mental health fund.

It’s never happened, and it’s never been mentioned again. In fact, in the 2025 budget, there was no money allocated for addictions and mental health. Zero.

That’s not leadership, and it is why stories like Prashanth’s are becoming more common. But it’s not normal, and it’s not acceptable.

What is supposed to define us as Canadians is our healthcare, and it is crumbling.

These deaths aren’t random. They share common roots:

• Overloaded emergency departments, with not enough staff or beds.
• Surgical waitlists that stretch out for months or years without proper tracking or transparency.
• Inconsistent reporting and no national standard for measuring or addressing deaths while waiting for care.

No place for addiction treatment and long waitlists for mental health crises.
No plan to get more doctors.

The jokes aren’t funny; they are sad: If you need a doctor, call an Uber. Canada doesn’t have healthcare—it has sick care.

Did I mention Canada’s percentage of deaths attributed to MAID (medical assistance in dying) is among the highest in the world where assisted dying is legal, second only to the Netherlands in some analyses?

And while provinces are responsible for delivering healthcare, this crisis is occurring across the country, in every province, under governments of every political stripe.

This Goes Beyond Provincial Blame

Stories like Prashanth’s, Allison’s, and Finlay’s make one thing clear: this isn’t a quirk in one province somewhere. It’s a national crisis.

People are dying waiting for care they should have received. They are dying in ER waiting rooms, on surgical waitlists, and because delays allowed conditions to worsen. And these are not isolated anecdotes; they are part of ongoing trends supported by multiple data sources.

We Need National Leadership, Not Deflection

Fixing this will not happen by pointing fingers at premiers or politicians in any one province.

Fixing this—or at least stopping the bleeding—requires:

• National standards for wait times and accountability
• A coherent system to track and report deaths related to care delays
• Investment targeted at outcomes that matter: access, staffing, capacity, and timeliness
• Leadership and accountability at the federal level that treats healthcare as more than a talking point

Accountability for where and how money is spent.
A national plan to treat addictions and mental health, with hospitals resourced and outpatient support for patients, peers, and families.
A comprehensive audit of the Canada Health Act and inspiration from other models that offer flexibility and choice.

During the 2025 election, the Conservatives launched a Blue Seal Policy. This would be similar to a Red Seal program that would fast-track doctors and healthcare workers to complete a standardized test to practice in Canada. Currently, it is estimated there are nearly 40,000 doctors and healthcare workers living in Canada who can’t practice medicine because of red tape and delays.

There are six million Canadians without a family doctor. That’s 1 in 5 adults. This can be fixed with good leadership and strategy.

Until we acknowledge this isn’t just “a big province problem,” and until Ottawa steps up with real leadership, not excuses, we will continue to see headlines like Prashanth’s.

And Canadians will continue dying waiting for Canadian “free” healthcare.

What is more costly than that?

Michelle Ferreri is a political commentator, strategic communications and media consultant, and the former Member of Parliament for Peterborough—Kawartha