Health-care hiring has propped up Canada’s job market. Will patients see a
A hiring boom across Alberta and Ontario health-care systems has been singlehandedly propping up Canada’s national job market — but that growth may say more about the sluggish state of the rest of the economy than about improving patient outcomes.
A report from Desjardins Group looking at Statistics Canada jobs data shows the two provinces have collectively added over 100,000 health-care jobs, mainly in public institutions, since the early days of the U.S. trade war, a trend consistent with increased funding for the sector set aside in those provinces’ budgets.
Desjardins’ analysis of provincial budget documents shows Alberta and Ontario each planned to spend upwards of $8 billion more on health in 2026 than 2025. Ontario budgeted $91.5 billion for health last year while Alberta budgeted $24 billion.
Without that hiring, Canada’s employment picture “would have been broadly flat,” the report’s author, Desjardins deputy chief economist Randall Bartlett, told CBC News — which he said means claims of a robust Canadian economy are “a little misguided.”
Labour Force Survey data shows that since March 2025, there were nearly 133,000 jobs added nationwide in the health-care and social assistance sector — with hiring “most pronounced in hospitals and services for the elderly,” the report notes — more than the 118,000 jobs added in all other sectors combined.
That concentrated hiring shows Alberta and Ontario following through on policies to increase spending “in the hope of expanding and supporting public health care,” Bartlett said, with the end goal ideally playing out as tangible improvements to the system.
Whether that happens is another matter, however, with economists and health policy experts noting that more spending and job growth in health care don’t automatically lead to better services for patients.
“It’s really important to remember that just because a job is in the health-care sector, it does not mean that it’s a job that’s touching patients,” said Fiona Clement, director of the Centre for Health Policy at the University of Calgary’s Cummings School of Medicine.
In Alberta, where the government restructured its previous health authority into four separate agencies, “the entire support infrastructure of a ministry has to be replicated three more times,” Clement said.
“Thinking about it at that level, it makes a lot of sense to me that there has been growth in that workforce.”
There’s less evidence that the new jobs have been in front-line patient care, Clement said, noting that College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta data shows “there has not been meaningful growth in the number of physicians in the province.”
Alberta’s new dual practice health-care model, which allows doctors to work in both the public and private systems, officially launched Tuesday. Premier Danielle Smith says it will relieve strain…
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