Focus on funding our medical students first

RE: Saudi Dispute Hits Hospitals, Aug. 9

The suggestion that because the payment by Saudi Arabia for medical positions in our universities and hospitals creates positions over and above what our provinces fund, is very misleading, and speaks to the shortsightedness of our reality.

We are chronically short doctors because our government does not provide enough financial support for medical positions to serve the needs of the Canadian public. One of the reasons they provide insufficient funding is because we pursue the short-term fiscal strategy of big bucks associated with foreign students.

The result is that qualified Canadian medical students are either denied entry to our local schools and hospitals, or they are forced to go abroad for their training. This is discouraging and unfair to our local youth, and in the end only hurts the Canadian public. This is exacerbated by the fact that taxpayers pay (and have paid for) the vast majority of the school and hospital infrastructures that supports this medical training.

So school, hospital and government bureaucrats, please spare me the crocodile tears in lamenting the loss of foreign students, when this should wake us up to the reality that we must reduce our reliance on foreign student cash to properly serving our local youth, and our taxpayers.

In other words, reduce the number of foreign medical students, since it impinges on our ability to serve our needs first. Frank Scott, Ottawa