Ontario rescinds its requirement for two years at an Ont. high school for residency spots

The Ontario government has dropped a controversial policy that required medical school graduates to have attended at least two years of high school in the province to qualify for medical residency positions.The reversal was disclosed Thursday, the deadline for legal arguments in a constitutional challenge against the provincial mandate. The policy, introduced in October 2025, was intended to increase the retention of doctors within the province. However, government data indicated that International Medical Graduates (IMGs) and Canadian-trained graduates share an identical 87% retention rate after completing their training.Though retention was the official reason for the rule, critics argue the policy’s real intent was to favour Canadians studying abroad (known as CSAs)—citizens who attend medical school in countries like Ireland or Australia and are also counted as IMGs—by removing competition from immigrant physicians. The rule “seriously disadvantaged international medical graduates, physicians who studied abroad but became permanent residents of Canada,” wrote André Picard of the Globe and MailThe policy faced immediate legal opposition and was suspended by a judicial stay in November. In a December interlocutory judgment, Justice Markus Koehnen ruled the requirement surely violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, specifically:Section 6: Guaranteeing the mobility rights of workers.Section 15: Protecting equality rights and prohibiting discrimination based on national origin.Justice Koehnen noted that the two lead applicants in the challenge—surgeons trained in Brazil who immigrated as permanent residents—had already demonstrated “considerable” commitment to the province.The province’s decision to drop the rule avoids a full hearing that was scheduled to begin on June 8. “Having suffered a legal smackdown, it’s not clear what Ontario will do next,” wrote Picard. “But the smartest approach would be to do nothing. Tacitly acknowledge that limiting the job opportunities of IMGs was a boneheaded move and recognize that we should be making it easier, not harder, for qualified physicians to find work in a system that desperately needs them.”

Ontario rescinds its requirement for two years at an Ont. high school for residency spots

Register for free access or login.

Related Topics