This is a pretty misleading stat. It appears to be counting people who immigrate at a young age and are then trained in the Canadian system. That isn't expanding the pool of healthcare workers, unless there were somehow a shortage of applicants. That absolutely is not the case for physicians, where every year the med school applicants vastly exceed the number of spots.
So what should really be counted is foreign-trained immigrants who were able to have their credentials considered equivalent, and entered directly into employment.
Yeas, exactly. Otherwise this shows the real problem with the health sector; it is undervalued, underpaid and thus requires cheap labor with less accrued wealth to maintain its labour force.
Canadian doctors and nurses do fine financially, but there aren't enough of them because Canadian healthcare is a command economy. The government sets a total cost it is willing to pay for healthcare and then sets the number of positions for doctors and nurses based on that budget, not market demand. That's how Canada is in the insane position of being a first world country where 15% of the population doesn't have a family doctor.
Retirement or nursing homes are a different story, and aren't particularly flattering for GP's point. Those do heavily rely on temporary foreign workers (TFWs) or recent immigrants paid around minimum wage, and the quality of care reflects that. There have been numerous scandals in the last couple years during COVID regarding substandard care, with seniors not receiving food/water or being left in their own feces for days. It shouldn't be surprising when bare minimum pay results in substandard outcomes, and the ability of employers to bring in TFWs prevents wages from rising according to market forces.
Immigrants are 21.5% of the population. They are also on average younger than the rest of the population, so they will use less medical services. The average age of a Canadian actually went down this year for the first time in over 50 years because of younger immigrants arriving.
So what should really be counted is foreign-trained immigrants who were able to have their credentials considered equivalent, and entered directly into employment.