An ambulance arrives at a Quebec hospital.Ryan Remiorz
Quebec, a province with a critical shortage of family doctors, discriminates against foreign-trained physicians and makes it difficult for them to become medical residents, the final step to gain a licence to practise medicine. It is a habit that needs to end. In the global competition for talent, Quebec will lose out.
While foreigners from many professional fields often feel frustrated that their credentials are not recognized, their complaints are hard to substantiate.
However, in this case, the Quebec Human Rights Commission conducted a three-year investigation and concluded this week that international medical graduates are subject to "ethnic-based" discrimination.
The inquiry found that while every doctor who graduated from a Quebec medical facility was offered a residency in 2007, two-thirds of foreign-trained doctors who had passed their medical equivalency exams in the province were rejected. The faculties at Quebec's medical schools do not place foreign-trained doctors in residencies because of "apprehension" about their qualifications, the commission said, which is all the more regrettable because 85 residency positions remained vacant.
The province's four medical schools must reform their admission procedures and make sure that this vast pool of human capital does not go to waste - especially in a province where 1.7 million people do not have a family doctor. Quebec's Minister of Health, the College of Physicians and the medical schools should work together to revise the way applicants for residency positions are screened, and ensure that international medical graduates receive the institutional support they need. There is no need for them to be assessed for "social maturity," or communication ability, if they have already passed the equivalency exams. They should not be asked how they would react if they failed their internship (a question never put to Quebec medical graduates).
Instead, international medical graduates should be assessed objectively, universities should be made aware of their professional backgrounds, and Quebec should facilitate the entry of these elite immigrants into the profession - or risk losing them to Ontario or New Brunswick, provinces with a better track record of integrating foreign doctors, or to another country altogether.