Minister Duclos highlights budget investments to strengthen public health care and support health workers and students

April 5, 2023 | Sydney, Nova Scotia | Health Canada

Through Budget 2023—A Made-in-Canada Plan, the Government of Canada is making investments that will support a stronger middle class, an affordable economy, and a healthy future for Canadians. Canada’s economic growth was the strongest in the G7 over the last year, and today, 830,000 more Canadians are employed than before the pandemic, including 28,100 in Nova Scotia.

Today, the Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Health and Mike Kelloway, Member of Parliament for Cape Breton – Canso, joined President and Vice-Chancellor of Cape Breton University, the Honourable David C. Dingwall to meet with nursing students at Cape Breton University (CBU) and highlight Budget 2023’s investments to strengthen public health care and support health workers across the country. The visit also highlighted the important actions of CBU to help address health care challenges, including their recently announced Medical Campus which will enhance medical training capacity and improve access to family health services in Cape Breton. 

To strengthen Canada’s universal public health care system, Budget 2023 highlighted the government’s plan to provide close to $200 billion over 10 years, which includes over $5 billion to Nova Scotia for timely access to a family health team or provider, a sustainable health workforce, better access to quality mental health services, and ensuring patients have access to their own electronic health information.

Helping Canadians age with dignity, closer to home, with access to home care or care in a safe long-term care facility is another shared priority where collaborative work is already underway.

Canada's health workers are the backbone of our health care system, but they are currently experiencing unprecedented challenges, which is why Budget 2023 includes funding to better support them. Together with provinces and territories, work is underway to improve conditions for health workers so that they can keep doing what they do best – keeping patients healthy.

Personal support workers (PSWs), for example, take important care of people and deserve to be fairly paid. Budget 2023 includes $1.7 billion over five years to support hourly wage increases for these workers and related professions. To help more health workers work in Canada quicker, we are also working with provinces and territories and other health partners to streamline foreign credential recognition for internationally educated health professionals and advance multi-jurisdictional credential recognition so that well-trained health care professionals can work wherever there is need across the country.

The Government of Canada continues to support doctors and nurses with our investments, including initiatives like the expansion of the Canada Student Loan Forgiveness program for doctors and nurses who work in underserved rural or remote communities.

With these significant investments in Budget 2023, and the ongoing work with provinces, territories, and health partners, we will continue to support health workers and our public health care system as they are essential to our well-being—and are an important foundation of a growing, healthy economy.