As someone who has been to a hospital 7 times in my life, 3 of which have been in the past week, I'm absolutely dumbfounded by the Canadian Medical system and how this is real life

We need more urgent care clinics run primarily by nurse practitioners with the usual fleet of scanning equipment. So many "emergency" visits can be handled by nurse practitioners. NPs should be given ability to prescribe drugs as well. Adding hundreds of these clinics across the country would reduce wait times considerably. Also, NPs could take the place of family doctors... most family doctor visits can easily be handled by NPs. Having doctors as the gatekeepers to healthcare is part of the bottleneck. As for specialist shortages... that's another matter altogether.