Wait-times in Canada: the 30-year picture

Canada's specialty wait-times did not appear overnight. They have grown by 200 to 500 percent since 1993, depending on the specialty, and the country now ranks last among eleven comparable health systems for timely access to specialist care.

This brief traces the three-decade trend and argues that the dominant cause is over-referral without triage support, not a shortage of specialists. It sets the context for why a sorting solution, applied at the front of the queue, changes the slope of the line where adding capacity has not.