Too Many Canadians Are Leaving Emergency Rooms Untreated

September 18, 2025

Emmanuelle B. Faubert

Economic Note examining the number of people who leave emergency rooms untreated in each Canadian province and the need to address upstream problems accessing care in order to reduce ER overcrowding

Whether to find a family doctor, consult a specialist, or get emergency care, wait times in Canada are infamously long. When Canadians show up at an emergency room, it’s often because they have no other options. Yet, in spite of this, hundreds of thousands of Canadians leave emergency rooms without being treated every year.

This phenomenon is one of the most worrisome symptoms of the lack of access to care in Canada. Below are Canadian data capturing this reality, presented and analyzed for the first time.

How Many Canadians Leave ERs Untreated?

In order to sketch a picture of the situation in Canada, we collected data on the number of people who leave emergency rooms before having been treated in each Canadian province. We looked specifically at the proportion of patients who leave ERs untreated, compared to the total number of visits. This provides a telling indicator of access to emergency care: the less the health system is able to meet the needs of the population in terms of care, the higher this ratio will be.

Requests for access to information were sent to the provincial and regional health authorities of the ten provinces. At the time of publication, the data analyzed cover all provinces, with the exception of New Brunswick’s francophone network, which was omitted for data quality reasons. The data nonetheless cover almost the entire Canadian population.(1)

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