Montreal QC — Shortage of doctors
A question returns every spring, when the CaRMS match results are published: how is it that a province of more than eight million people offers only a few hundred residency spots to its future specialists? Every year, capable, qualified medical graduates ready to practise find themselves without a residency position — while emergency rooms across Quebec desperately seek staff.
The short answer: the number of spots does not follow the population; it follows the funding. And that is exactly where the problem lies.
Numbers that give pause
The 2026 match offered 4,029 positions in the first iteration across Canada, and 3,664 were filled. On the Quebec side, 1,612 Canadian graduates, 279 international medical graduates (IMGs) and 6 US graduates applied to at least one program in the province. The match rate for Quebec graduates reached 90.2% in the first iteration — slightly below the national average of 92.8%.
Concretely, across Quebec’s four medical faculties, the Université de Montréal offered 333 spots, Laval 245, Sherbrooke 226 and McGill 212. Each left dozens of spots unfilled in the first iteration.
The real bottleneck
Look at the competition by specialty: in neurosurgery, there are fewer than two Canadian applicants for every spot. In dermatology, plastic surgery and ophthalmology, it is even tighter. At the opposite end, family medicine — the specialty most in demand by the public system — is the one that accepts most widely, with nearly two spots offered for every first choice.
That is the whole Quebec paradox: we are short of doctors, yet we limit the number of residents trained each year. Residency spots are set by provincial budgets and workforce planning, not by the number of graduates knocking at the door. When three hundred qualified graduates compete for thirty spots in dermatology, the problem is not their talent — it is the number of spots decided upstream, in the corridors of planning and public finance.
CaRMS data presented in May 2026 confirm it: only 60% of applicants who targeted only the most competitive specialties, with dermatology, ophthalmology or plastic surgery as their first choice, landed a spot. Between 20% and 25% of graduates left unmatched after the first round had their sights on those same three specialties.
A human and systemic cost
For the future doctor, it is years of life put on hold. For the system, it is a shortage that keeps widening. Quebec already sits below the national average for matching its own graduates, and that rate slipped in 2026: 3.1% of Quebec graduates ended up without a spot after the second iteration, up from 1.8% the year before.
Every residency spot not created is one fewer doctor in the emergency rooms, CLSCs and hospitals — at a time when demand is rising and the population is aging faster.
Solutions within reach
Unblocking this means several levers: increasing funding for residency spots in high-demand specialties, aligning planning with demographic reality, easing the path for trained international graduates ready to practise, and spreading the teaching load across the province’s faculties.
The shift has already begun: the number of international graduates matched in Canada rose from 410 in 2021 to 931 in 2026.
The question is not whether Quebec graduates enough doctors. It does. The real question is whether we are ready to fund the spots so they can, at last, serve the population that needs them so badly.
This editorial is based on published CaRMS 2026 match data.