Injunction sought over Ontario foreign medical resident rule

An Ontario court has been asked to set aside the province’s controversial rule that bars most international medical graduates from participating in the first round of matching for medical residency placements.

Last month, Ontario’s Health Ministry abruptly changed its eligibility policy by requiring candidates to have completed at least two years of high school in the province to be considered for the placements. That means the process will exclude most immigrant physicians from the first round, in turn limiting the pool of potential medical graduates who want to become family doctors.

On Monday, at a case conference, applicant Dominique Vervoort and the Black Physicians of Canada asked the Divisional Court for an injunction against a policy that they described as “unlawful, unreasonab