Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to return to the House after a summer in Don Valley North and meeting with neighbours to talk about how we can keep making our community a better place for everyone. I look forward to working with all MPs to do good by Canadians.

I know my colleague put on notice a question regarding workforce planning and health care in the health care sector, so I will be responding to that.

I am pleased to rise in the House today to speak on a subject that I know is of concern to many of us: the urgent need to strengthen Canada's health care workforce by integrating internationally educated health professionals into the health care system. Canada's health workforce is currently facing some critical challenges, including long-term shortages, low retention and workplace conditions that put additional pressures on workers. Recent estimates project that there could be shortages of over 23,000 family physicians and 28,000 registered nurses. These shortages are projected to deepen over the next 10 years if there are more pressures added to the health care system, such as increased incidence of chronic illnesses and a growing population.

Internationally trained, educated health professionals are key to addressing these challenges; however, current processes to validate foreign credentials are long, costly and complex. They are creating barriers for the successful recruitment and retention of these professionals in our health care system. There are an estimated 198,000 internationally educated health professionals employed in Canada, but only 58% work in the field they are trained in.

As we know, health care is a shared responsibility between the federal government and our provincial and territorial partners. While the federal government provides financial support for health care services, responsibility for matters related to administration and delivery of the services, including health profession regulation, licensure and foreign credential recognition, falls within provincial and territorial jurisdiction. However, our government understands we have a role to play and we are actively working with our provincial and territorial partners to address current challenges for Canada's health workforce. This includes ensuring immigration policy support, recruiting internationally educated health professionals, working to help streamline foreign credential recognition and supporting retention efforts to have long-term success and integration within the health system.

This is why, beginning this year, our government is funding a number of projects to better integrate internationally educated health professionals into Canada's provincial and territorial health care systems. This funding will create new family medicine training positions for international medical graduates, increase assessment capacity to support accelerated licensure processes for internationally educated health professions and provide support to help newcomers navigate the credential recognition system. The foreign credential recognition program also continues to fund various initiatives to support the labour market integration of skilled newcomers.

Provinces and territories are also making individual action a part of the working together to improve health care for Canadians plan. As a result, differentiated, innovative pathways for internationally educated health professionals to enter the health system are rapidly emerging at the provincial and territorial level. For example, Nova Scotia created the Physician Assessment Centre of Excellence, which allows internationally trained physicians to provide supervised primary care in a collaborative-care setting while being assessed for licensure.

Finally, our government understands that Canada must not only attract health care workers from around the world, but also make sure they are properly integrated into the health care workforce. Further, with health care workers facing burnout, we need to ensure they have the support they need to stay on in their jobs.

Earlier this year, our government published the “Ethical framework for the recruitment and retention of internationally educated health professionals in Canada”—

Maggie Chi

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