BC healthcare: twice the money, longer waits

Nobody can accuse this government of underfunding healthcare. The health budget has roughly doubled on the NDP's watch, passing $35 billion in 2025, more than a third of all provincial spending.^⁠[1]

The question is what British Columbians got for the money.

One in four, no family doctor

When the NDP took office in 2017, 897,000 British Columbians had no family doctor. By April 2026 the number was 1,259,425, up 45%, nearly one in four people. The median wait to be matched with a doctor through the province's own registry stood at 295 days.^⁠[2]

Emergency rooms, measured two ways

First, the people who gave up: 141,961 patients left BC emergency rooms in 2024-25 without ever being seen, up 86% from 2018-19.^⁠[3]

Second, the doors that never opened. The paramedics' union counted more than 250 temporary ER and hospital closures across BC in 2025 and warned of more through the winter.^⁠[4] Merritt's hospital reached its tenth closure of 2026 before September.^⁠[5]

The waits keep growing

The Fraser Institute's annual survey put Canada's median wait from referral to treatment at 30 weeks in 2024, the longest ever recorded.^⁠[6] In 2025 the national median improved and BC went the other way, worsening to 32.2 weeks.^⁠[7]

Angus Reid's February 2026 survey ranked BC worst or tied for worst in Canada on specialist access, diagnostic access, and confidence in timely emergency care.^⁠[8]

Paid more, hired more, got less

Here is the whole story in three lines. BC paid more. BC hired more. BC got less. When a health system gets more money and more staff and delivers less care, the problem is how it is run, and running it is the provincial government's job.

We paid more

The health budget grew by $16.2 billion a year between 2017-18 and 2025-26. Three-quarters of the increase went to the health authorities, the six health authorities, five regional and one provincial, that run hospitals, care homes, and home care, and most of that became wages. Another fifth went to doctors.

Part of the doubling is inflation and a growing population. Take both out and BC still spends about 27% more per person than in 2017.^{⁠[11]⁠[12]} That is billions of dollars a year in real new money.

We hired more

The money bought people. Hospital staff per 1,000 British Columbians rose 23% between 2014-15 and 2023-24, nearly three times the national increase of 9%.^⁠[13] Family doctors and registered nurses both grew faster than the population.

We got less

Those gains were swallowed. The average family doctor billing the province saw 1,027 patients in 2024-25, down from 1,496 in 2017-18.^⁠[16] Scheduled surgeries rose about 9%.^⁠[17] A standard hospital stay now costs more in BC than in any other province.^⁠[18]

Why: mismanagement

None of this is bad luck. Each of these is a decision the government made or a problem it let run.

It paid doctors more without expecting them to keep their patient load. The province co-developed a new family doctor payment model in 2022,^⁠[22] expected to raise their pay by at least 50%. Physician spending jumped $1 billion in its first year.^⁠[21]

The CCPA's explanation of what followed: "With sudden increases in pay, doctors typically maintain or increase their income while working less."^⁠[21] Paying doctors more makes sense. Paying them more without expecting them to maintain their patient load is how you get more doctors and longer waitlists.

It ran hospitals on overtime. BC hospitals paid $729 million in overtime in 2023-24, up from $272 million four years earlier, and $270 million for agency staff, up from $61 million.^⁠[23] In 2024-25, 12.1% of hours on BC hospital nursing units were overtime, the highest in Canada against a national 7.4%. In emergency departments it was 17.5%.^⁠[24]

That is the main reason a BC hospital stay costs more than anywhere else in Canada. CIHI names the biggest drivers of that cost as "compensation rates (including use of overtime and agency staff) and staff mix (including seniority)."^⁠[25]

That is not a shortage of nurses. BC has more of them per person than before COVID, and a UVic nursing professor told CTV the reliance on agencies comes down to "dysfunction."^⁠[26] The nurses exist. The system does not deploy or keep them where they are needed.

It hired nurse managers faster than bedside nurses. Between 2017 and 2024 the number of registered nurses working as staff nurses in BC hospitals grew 4%, well behind population. The number in manager positions grew 57%, from 1,176 to 1,850.^⁠[27]

It let spending run past budget. In 2023-24 the six health authorities spent $3 billion more than they had budgeted.^⁠[28]

It let head office outgrow care. At Fraser Health, corporate costs rose 147% between 2017-18 and 2025-26, while spending on hospital care rose 101%.^{⁠[29]⁠[30]} Across BC health care, management headcount and pay grew faster than almost any other group, doctors included.^⁠[31]

As Vaughn Palmer has pointed out, BC spends almost twice as much on health care administration as Alberta, $350 million against $180 million by CIHI's count, and its health authorities have "70 or so presidents and vice-presidents. Alberta has fewer than 10." Alberta runs one health authority. BC runs six: five regional and one provincial.^⁠[32]

And it kept paying hospitals for their past, not their patients. BC hospitals get a lump sum based mostly on past budgets, so treating more patients brings in no more money. As the Fraser Institute puts it, "hospitals view patients as a cost that drain their budgets."^⁠[33]

Whose job it was

Every one of those levers belongs to the province. The health minister appoints the voting members of every health authority board, and each board must follow the minister's directions.^⁠[34] The ministry sets their budgets^⁠[10] and negotiated the doctors' payment model.^⁠[22]

Eby's answer, eight years into NDP government, was a review that cut 1,100 administrative positions in 2025 to save more than $60 million a year.^⁠[35] That is less than 0.5% of the money added. It does nothing about doctors seeing fewer patients, hospitals charging more per stay, or a workforce run on overtime.

Nobody was held to account for the results. Ministers were moved instead. Adrian Dix held health for seven years and left it in 2024 "because of his track record of success," in Eby's words.^⁠[36] Josie Osborne lasted 21 months before being shuffled to finance.^⁠[37] The current minister has already said he will not run again.^⁠[38]

Twice the money. More staff. Less care. More people without a doctor, longer waits, and emergency rooms that close for the weekend. If a company posted this record its executives would be gone; in Eby's government they are promoted on the way through.