For years, New Brunswickers have heard a shifting set of numbers about how many people don’t have a family doctor or nurse practitioner. The figure has come from wait lists, surveys and political talking points, and nobody could say which one was right. Now the province says it has a number it can stand behind.
The new number: about 263,000
The government has switched to using Medicare registration data. Premier Susan Holt said 619,354 people registered with Medicare are attached to primary care services, out of 882,112 current registrants. That count is as of Sept. 18.
Subtract one from the other and roughly 262,758 New Brunswickers have no primary care provider. That subtraction is my own, not an official figure. It means only 70.2 per cent of people registered with Medicare are attached to a provider, so nearly 30 per cent are not.
Why the old numbers kept missing
The province has relied on several measures, and each had a flaw:
- The Health Link wait list. The deputy minister of health acknowledged that the roughly 104,000 people then registered did not represent the actual number without a provider. Some people never sign up. The list also leaves out anyone who doesn’t know it exists.
- The Health Council survey. It was the best tool available, but Holt said its results can lag up to a year behind reality. The Health Council’s CEO also warned MLAs that some of its numbers were being taken out of context.
- Political estimates. In 2024, the PC Party pointed to about 38,000 people on Health Link, while the Liberals cited 180,000 from the Health Council study. Both were describing the same problem.
This month, Holt admitted that previous calculations of how many residents have a provider weren’t reliable.
Why it hurts
The new count is worse than almost anything the province had put forward. In March, the province reported more than 127,000 people still waiting for a family doctor or nurse practitioner, and Holt admitted the real figure was probably higher. The Medicare-based count suggests it is about double that.
The regional breakdown is uneven too. In the Campbellton and North-East zone, only 62.2 per cent of people are attached. In the Bathurst and Acadian Peninsula zone, it’s 79 per cent. Where you live still shapes your odds.
What happens next
The government’s goal is 85 per cent attachment, or 749,795 people, by the end of 2028. That means attaching roughly 130,000 more people in about two years and three months, while the population keeps growing. The main tool is collaborative care clinics. The province wants to open 30 of them. In March, Holt said about a third of the first clinics’ 17,000-patient goal had been reached.
A trustworthy baseline matters because it turns a political argument into something measurable. Every future announcement can now be checked against the same number. If the clinics are working, the gap should shrink month by month. If it doesn’t, the province can’t blame the data.
For now, the number is the real story: close to 263,000 people, and a clock running down to 2028.
