Children’s Healthcare Is the Foundation of a Healthy Canada
[Originally printed in The Hill Times on February 11, 2026]
By Emily Gruenwoldt and Dr. Katharine Smart
Across Canada, the start of a new year brings familiar signs of strain across our healthcare systems. Emergency departments are overcrowded, wait times and costs are rising and workforce shortages persist. Governments respond with new investments, yet the pressure remains. Despite increased spending, Canadians are no healthier.
This is not a failure of commitment or compassion. It is the predictable outcome of an illness-based healthcare system.
Canada will never spend its way out of a model that is illness-based, as opposed to focused on prevention. If we keep just responding to illness, demand will continue to outpace capacity. The only sustainable path forward is to improve population health — and that trajectory is shaped early in life.
If Canada is serious about stabilizing and sustaining healthcare systems, we must start with children.
Over the past two years, Children’s Healthcare Canada has engaged with child health leaders nationwide through a 20-episode podcast series. One consistent message emerged: the long-term health of Canadians — and the affordability of healthcare — depends on whether we invest intentionally and strategically in children and youth. Not later. Not incidentally. Now.
Childhood is a crucial period for shaping lifelong health. Early health is developmental and time-sensitive, with critical windows for diagnosis, treatment, and intervention that cannot be recovered once missed. Delays in care are not merely inconvenient; they can permanently alter health trajectories, educational attainment, and lifelong wellbeing. When children wait months or years for essential services, the costs are not deferred — they compound across decades.
Right-sizing children’s healthcare begins with acknowledging several realities.
First, Canada’s population of children is growing with more than 1.2 million additional children by 2040.
Second, children’s needs are increasingly complex, with rising rates of neurodevelopmental conditions, mental health challenges, and chronic illness within a highly diverse population. Third, children are not small adults and they need tailored systems, spaces, equipment, medications, and workforce models.
Right-sizing does not mean building larger hospitals or adding unlimited downstream capacity — this has proven costly and ineffective. A right-sized system delivers the right care, in the right place, at the right time — well before illness occurs. Community-based developmental, rehabilitation, and mental health services; strong primary care; home care; and regional outreach programs allow children to receive support earlier, while enabling tertiary and quaternary hospitals to focus on the most complex cases. When community capacity erodes, hospitals and emergency departments absorb pressures they were never designed to manage.
We know that when children experience illness or developmental delay, families’ mental health, economic stability, and ability to remain in the workforce are threatened. Evidence consistently shows that when families are supported — through coordinated care, accommodation, meals, and respite — children’s outcomes improve while system utilization decreases.
Equity must be embedded, so that geography, income, race, and circumstance stop being obstacles to obtaining care. National standards, improved data collection, and intentional system design are essential to ensuring equitable access for all children — not only those living near major urban centers.
Currently, responsibility for children’s wellbeing is fragmented across jurisdictions and ministries, spanning health, mental health, education, disability, and social services.
What Canadian children need is a National Children’s Strategy. It would provide the structure needed to move beyond crisis management toward long-term sustainability. It would not replace provincial delivery of care. Rather, it would establish shared goals, common data, aligned investment priorities, and measurable outcomes —
Children’s health isn’t a niche policy issue; it is the basis of a sustainable healthcare system. When children receive timely, coordinated care, the benefits extend far beyond families — reducing emergency department use, supporting parental workforce participation, lowering lifelong disability costs, and strengthening the economic resilience of the country.
Canada’s healthcare system is under extraordinary strain. Only by making people healthier will we be able to afford and sustain the system we value — and that begins in childhood.
Right-sizing children’s healthcare — and advancing a National Children’s Strategy — is nation-building work. The decisions we make today will shape not only the sustainability of our healthcare system, but the health, resilience, and prosperity of the generation that will inherit it.
The question before us is not whether Canada can afford to invest in children — but whether we can afford not to.