Oh yeah, sounds familiar for sure. There are some legitimate bottlenecks for increasing the residency spots (the number of residency spots you can open is limited by the number of doctors you already have), but there's a lot of other nonsense. We bring in a lot of immigrant doctors and give them no streamlined way to convert their credentials so they can work here, so a lot of them just end up driving taxis.

Medical school here is insanely competitive, so much so that a lot of brilliant students don't bother with it at all (you risk doing 4 years in Life/Health Science and then getting fucked when you don't get into Med School).

Not to mention that it takes an absurdly long to become a doctor here. 4 years undergrad + 4 years med school + 3 years internship + another 2 years internship if you want to specialize. Why don't we streamline the process by cutting out the undergrad like most countries? Because, like you say, some think it'll dilute the quality of our doctors, which is nonsense since it takes less time to become a doctor in most countries where healthcare is just as good.

Holding the profession up on too high a pedestal is preventing Canadians from receiving adequate healthcare.

We had that bollocks here in NZ too. Another reason given for not increasing the number of training facilities was that once qualified, the doctors & nurses would go to another country; no thought whatsoever about bonding or writing off student loans if they stayed for x years, just "nah".

At the same time non-elective procedures are being cancelled because we don't have the staff...

>but some people then started going on about "lesser quality applicants" getting in

Aren't a large number of doctors in Australia basically just Indians who migrate then pass the medical exam there? wouldn't local training still be preferable?