He said it took him just two weeks in 2019 to find a family doctor in Vancouver, British Columbia, and then again the same in Toronto, Ontario. There is no doubt that the situation was much better before the pandemic during which medical services in many parts of Canada were close to collapse.

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Of these, 17 per cent had given up on looking for a family doctor while “almost one-third of all respondents (29 per cent) were trying to find a new family doctor and most have been looking for less than two years”.

In Canada, family doctors are the gatekeepers, so it is impossible to get specialist treatment without a referral from one.

Our reader says he also doesn’t need to pay for any medical treatment, including drug prescriptions.

That’s because of his age. If you are 24 or younger, or if you are 65 or older, it’s free prescriptions for many generic drugs, but not all drugs. For everyone else, unless you meet exemption criteria such as unemployment, you pay. The latest brand name drugs are usually unavailable or only made available under special arrangements.

Our reader has not been hospitalised, so I must again congratulate him. He also tells us he received “Physiotherapy, X-rays, ultrasounds, MRIs, nuclear cardiac stress test, inguinal hernia surgery”, all presumably in a timely fashion. However, he did not give us his actual waiting times.

According to the survey, “patients also experience significant waiting times for various diagnostic technologies across the provinces. This year, Canadians [on average] could expect to wait 6.6 weeks for a computed tomography (CT) scan [compared with 5.4 weeks in 2022], 12.9 weeks for a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan [10.6 weeks in 2022], and 5.3 weeks for an ultrasound [4.9 weeks in 2022].”

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Specifically to the two places where the reader has lived, the waiting times for CT, MRI and ultrasound were respectively in British Columbia: eight weeks, 12 weeks, eight weeks; and in Ontario: five weeks, 10 weeks, three weeks.

But these, of course, vary greatly from place to place across Canada, as each province runs its own healthcare system of varying quality and efficiency.

“Saskatchewan had the shortest wait for an ultrasound (two weeks), while Prince Edward Island had the longest: 14 weeks.”

The wait for a CT scan was shortest in Quebec (four weeks) and the longest in Nova Scotia (14 weeks).

Patients in Ontario and Quebec faced the shortest wait for an MRI (10 weeks), while residents of Nova Scotia waited the longest (25 weeks).

However, the Fraser survey has no data on the provisions of physiotherapy, X-rays, nuclear cardiac stress test, and inguinal hernia surgery mentioned by the reader.

He also said he had seven specialists but it’s not clear whether they were the same as those who administered the aforementioned procedures; I assume he was making such an equation.

Generally, though, there was in 2023 a median waiting time of 27.7 weeks for a specialist from referral by a general practitioner to the receipt of treatment, compared with 27.4 weeks in 2022.

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Most such treatments referred to actual operations and invasive procedures, rather than the more routine non-invasive works such as CT, MRI and ultrasound. The latter three don’t fall under the specialist waiting time categories.

The median waiting time of 27.7 weeks is the longest recorded since the survey started in 1993 when it was 9.3 weeks, an increase of almost 200 per cent.

I would agree that Canadian healthcare is neither the best nor the worst in the world. For me, though, it’s the luck of the draw.

One thing is for sure. If we use waiting times as the key measure of efficient and timely delivery of treatment, Canadian taxpayers have been steadily getting declining healthcare since the 1990s and are getting less and less value for their tax dollar.