From the Fraser Institute

By Mackenzie Moir

Canada reported 10.6 MRI machines per million population, ranking us 27th out of 31 universal health-care countries and far behind fifth-ranked Germany (32.5 machines per million population). We see a similar story with CT scanners where second-ranked Australia (78.5 units per million) far outpaces Canada (14.6 units per million population)

Canada’s health-care system is in dire straits. We face an access crisis in primary care, regular rural emergency room closures, and some of the longest waits for non-emergency surgery in more than 30 years. Indeed, the median wait between referral to a specialist by a general practitioner and receipt of treatment was 30 weeks in 2024, the longest on record.

But beyond medical and surgical treatments, Canadians also face significant waits for key diagnostic services.

In 2024, the latest year of available data, patients could expect a 16.2-week wait for an MRI (more than three weeks longer than what they waited in 2023) and an 8.1-week wait for a CT scan (a week and half longer than in 2023).

Of course, these machines are crucial in the diagnosis and monitoring of many different illnesses. As a result, long waits for these machines can result in delays in diagnosis and the advancing of illness that can impact decisions around treatment and potential outcomes.

But why are there delays for this type of basic diagnostic care?

One explanation is that Canada has lower availability of these machines compared to other high-income universal health-care systems.

For example, using the latest available data from 2022 and after adjusting for population age, Canada reported 10.6 MRI machines per million population, ranking us 27th out of 31 universal health-care countries and far behind fifth-ranked Germany (32.5 machines per million population). We see a similar story with CT scanners where second-ranked Australia (78.5 units per million) far outpaces Canada (14.6 units per million population), which ranked 28th of 31.

These data also underscore the wider dissatisfaction among Canadians about how our governments steward our health-care systems. According to a recent Navigator poll, 73 per cent of Canadians want major health-care reform.

In the end, poor access to diagnostic imaging technology can prevent the appropriate triaging of patients and create further delays for scheduled care. Improving access to diagnostic imaging should help reduce delays for care overall and improve the lives of patients and their families.

From LifeSiteNews

By Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute

The world’s population is not only not exploding, it’s on the cusp of collapsing.

The collapse in birth rates that began in post-war Europe has, in the decades since, spread to every single corner of the globe.

Many nations are already feeling this death spiral, filling more coffins than cradles each year.

Just this past year, Japan lost nearly a million people. Poland lost 130,000.

However, the big story comes from China, home to one-sixth of the world’s population.

The decades-long devastation wrought by the one-child policy has sent that country, for centuries the pacesetter in population, into absolute decline.

China finally admitted that its population was shrinking, but demographers — including myself — believe that the numbers have been falling for almost a decade.

The Chinese government’s official population figure of 1.44 billion also greatly exaggerates its overall numbers, some analysts say by as much as 130 million people.

India, the country that has now overtaken China in population, is still growing, but not for long.

The average Indian woman was having only two children over her reproductive lifetime, the Indian government reported in 2021, well below the 2.25 or so needed to sustain the current population.

The same story is being repeated all over the world, as birthrates in Latin America, the Middle East, and even Africa are not just falling — they are collapsing.

The current total fertility of Tunisian women, for example, is estimated at 1.93.

The result of all these empty wombs is that humanity just passed a major milestone, although not one we should celebrate.

For the first time in the 60,000 or so years that human beings first arrived on the planet, we are not having enough babies to replace ourselves. No wonder Donald Trump has suggested providing free IVF to all Americans “because we want more babies,” he says.

Because of ever-lengthening life spans, the population will continue to grow until mid-century. But when this demographic momentum ends—and it will end—we will reach a second grim milestone on humanity’s downward trajectory:

For the first time since the Black Death in the Middle Ages, human numbers will decline.

The 14th century bubonic plague was the worst pandemic in human history. It killed off half the population of Europe and perhaps a third of the population of the Middle East.

But even as the plague was filling mass graves, the survivors kept filling cradles. And because the birth rate remained high the global population recovered although it took a century or so.

This time around, we may not be so fortunate. All the factors that influence fertility, from marriage rates to urbanization to education levels, are pushing births downward.

Now you may be excused for not knowing about the current birth dearth.

After all, powerful international agencies like the UN Population Fund and the World Bank have done their best to keep it out of the public eye.

Moreover, these agencies, set up during the height of the hysteria over “overpopulation” in the 1960s, like to overestimate births in one country and pad population numbers in another.

For example, the UN, in its annual World Population Prospects, claims that 705,000 babies were born in Colombia last year, when the country’s own government pegs the number at just 510,000.

This is not a rounding error.

Neither is the UN’s claim that Indian women are still averaging 2.25 children, defying the country’s own published statistics, which show that it is now below 2.0.

All this number fudging allows the UN to claim that the global total fertility rate last year was at 2.25, still above replacement

It’s even wrong about replacement rate fertility, which it says is 2.1 children per women.

It’s wrong because in many countries sex-selection abortion skews the sex ratio strongly in favor of boys.

To make up for the tens of millions of unborn baby girls missing in China, India and other Asian countries, those countries need more need 2.2 or even 2.3 children on average.

The UN exaggerates human numbers for the same reason that the Biden-Harris administration exaggerated employment numbers: for financial gain and political survival.

There are billions of dollars at stake, funding that is fueled by a dark fear of mushrooming human numbers.

The population control movement does not intend to go quietly to its grave, even as it continues to dig humanity’s own, so it feeds this fear.

But the world’s population is not only not exploding, it’s on the cusp of collapsing. Which is why it’s time to end the war on population.

This article was originally published on www.pop.org on September 3rd, 2024, before being reprinted in the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family’s Academy Review in November 2024.  Edited and republished here with permission.