The Healthcare Hiring Mirage: Why a Sector Boom Masks a Stalling Economy
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Opinion: Massive spending in Alberta and Ontario is propping up national employment numbers, but it's a dangerous distraction from a sluggish broader economy.
When you look at the national employment figures, it is easy to mistake a concentrated surge for a general recovery. But as a pocketbook journalist, I find the current narrative around Canada's job market to be dangerously misleading. We are witnessing a phenomenon where a hiring boom in one specific sector—healthcare—is acting as a life raft for an otherwise sinking ship.
As CBC Toronto first reported, a Desjardins Group report reveals that Alberta and Ontario have collectively added over 100,000 healthcare jobs since the start of the U.S. trade war. On the surface, this looks like growth. In reality, it is a localized explosion of spending that masks a broader economic malaise.
To understand the scale of this distortion, look at the Labour Force Survey data cited by CBC Toronto. Since March 2025, the healthcare and social assistance sector added nearly 133,000 jobs nationwide. To put that in perspective, every other sector of the Canadian economy combined added only 118,000 jobs. When one sector is outperforming the rest of the entire economy, it isn't a sign of a robust market; it is a sign of an imbalance.
Randall Bartlett, the deputy chief economist at Desjardins, told CBC Toronto that without this specific hiring surge, Canada's employment picture would have been "broadly flat." Bartlett went a step further, suggesting that claims of a robust Canadian economy are "a little misguided."
Where is this money coming from? It is coming from massive provincial budget commitments. Desjardins' analysis shows that both Alberta and Ontario each planned to spend upwards of $8 billion more on health in 2026 than they did in 2025. For context, Ontario's health budget last year was $91.5 billion, while Alberta's was $24 billion.
But here is the crux of the problem: this spending doesn't necessarily translate to a better life for the average worker or even better care for the average patient. Fiona Clement, director of the Centre for Health Policy at the University of Calgary's Cummings School of Medicine, warned CBC Toronto that a job in the healthcare sector doesn't automatically mean it is a job "touching patients."
In Alberta, the government restructured its health authority into four separate agencies. Clement noted that this requires the support infrastructure of a ministry to be replicated three more times, which naturally inflates the workforce without necessarily adding a single doctor to a clinic. Clement highlighted data from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta to support this, noting a lack of any "meaningful growth" in the number of doctors within the province.
Other factors are inflating these numbers too. Livio Di Matteo, a professor of economics at Lakehead University, noted that hiring may be a response to the expected retirement of nurses and physicians over the next five years. Additionally, Sara Allin, an associate professor of health policy at the University of Toronto, explained that healthcare spending typically increases as populations grow, often at a rate higher than economic growth.
We cannot allow the government to point to these healthcare numbers as evidence of economic health. When the vast majority of job growth is concentrated in public institutions funded by massive budget hikes, it isn't a sign of a thriving private sector or a dynamic economy. It is a government-funded patch on a sluggish system. For the average worker outside of a hospital or a long-term care facility, the economy isn't booming—it's stalling.