The Regional District of East Kootenay will be debating a doctor recruitment grant in its 2025 budget discussions.
The East Kootenay Division of Family Practice Society has requested $45,000 from the RDEK to continue their work in recruiting doctors to the area.
Directors voted in favour of bringing the request into budget deliberations, but not everyone was for it.
Director Steve Fairbairn says he will never be in favour of poaching doctors.
“I spent some time in developing countries and I witnessed the impact of North American, Canadian and provincial policy to address the doctor shortage,” he said.
“When you’re going to developing countries who have paid and trained their own medical staff and they are much shorter staffed than we are, I find that sort of morally corrupt.”
The funding request would primarily be used for Canadian and UK advertising.
Fairbairn says it doesn’t matter where the doctors come from, it’s shifting the problem instead of fixing it.
He says Canada needs to put more money into training its own doctors.
“We should be training our own doctors, we should be opening doors for Canadians who want to be doctors and Canadians who went offshore to get training to work in Canada,” he added.
“That’s the long-term solution. We are intentionally making the health situation worse in an awful amount of countries in a very self-serving manner. We have the finances to support our own medical system. Poaching is my term and I think there is a real evil side to it.”
The motion passed in a 9-6 vote so it will be in budget deliberations, however, that does not mean the funding will ultimately be approved.
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