I spent more than a decade working in emergency rooms, and I carry those shifts with me still. I remember young families waiting 12 hours through the night, not because there weren’t enough beds, but because there weren’t enough nurses or doctors to move the long line of patients ahead of them. I remember elderly patients arriving frail and frightened, plagued with multiple chronic illnesses, needing hours of attention in a system already stretched to its limit. And I remember the people who simply gave up and left without ever being treated.

Medical school and residency had prepared me to face tragic outcomes brought on by disease and trauma. They hadn’t prepared me to witness those outcomes unfold because our health-care system had failed. On many shifts, I felt a deep sense of shame as patients pleaded for attention. Their frustration was justified, and I knew we were letting them down.

This was not neglect on the part of health-care workers. By my 10th year in practice in 2014, we were routinely running at full tilt. The system was breaking down under a math problem we cannot escape: more older, sicker patients are showing up in the ER and fewer young, healthy Canadians are available to work as health-care providers. Nearly one in five Canadians is now a senior. Within a decade, it will be nearly one in four. That means millions more people needing complex care and not enough young Canadians to provide it. This is not a forecast. It’s a countdown.

The cracks are everywhere. Some 6.5 million Canadians lack a family doctor. Last year, emergency rooms across Ontario and Manitoba closed their doors because hospitals could not safely staff them. Patients in crisis are met not with care but with locked doors. The........

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