In 2022’s second quarter, B.C. saw its highest quarterly increase in population since the mid-1990s, according to Statistics Canada.B.C.’s population surge threatens to overwhelm an already fractured health-care system.
The province welcomed 45,515 new people – enough to hike its population by 0.9 per cent compared with 2022’s first quarter, to 5.32 million residents.
Year over year, B.C.’s population jumped by 2.2 per cent – the largest increase since late 1996.
Nearly 60 per cent of the newcomers were non-permanent residents, but the number of new permanent residents was well above typical second-quarter increases, said Central 1 chief economist Bryan Yu.
He added that interprovincial migration to B.C. was also strong, with a net total of about 4,300 of those new residents moving to B.C. in the second quarter.
In that same quarter, COVID-19 patient counts in hospitals ranged between 273 and 596, and the doctors’ advocacy organization Doctors of BC estimated that 900,000 British Columbians were without a family doctor – a number that keeps rising.
Other cracks in the system were clear early in the pandemic, when the government postponed tens of thousands of what Health Minister Adrian Dix called “non-urgent” surgeries to ensure sufficient hospital beds would be available in case the province was overwhelmed with severe COVID-19 infections.
He told people needing procedures such as hip replacements, cataract surgeries and hernia operations to simply wait – often in pain, and with no clear dates for when their medical treatments could take place.
Dix, who was not available for an interview, has taken measures to try to bolster the system – though not big enough measures and not soon enough, according to Opposition health critic Shirley Bond, who is calling for Dix to resign.
One of Dix’s bigger moves to retain recent medical school graduates came in June, when he offered incentives to encourage them to launch family doctor practices in B.C.
New family physicians became eligible to sign contracts to earn a $295,457 salary in their first year, plus a $25,000 signing bonus and medical-training debt forgiveness of up to $50,000 in the first year of work and potentially $20,000 in each of the next four years. Those doctors would also each get $75,000 to put toward their clinics’ overhead costs.
By the start of October, 54 doctors had signed the contracts and 60 others were in negotiations, according to B.C.’s Ministry of Health.
The ministry told BIV in an email that there is no cap to the number of new physicians that this program could finance.
A separate $118 million program aimed at keeping existing family doctors will provide about $25,000 to each family doctor in the province by January.
