As healthcare adds jobs faster than any other sector, a lag in wages and investment may create a talent pipeline crisis, say experts
Canada's health care and social assistance sector has become the country's most reliable job creator, but the sector's economic footprint – and the wages it pays – are lagging behind the demand for its workers, creating workforce planning challenges for the sector, according to experts.
Payroll employment in health care and social assistance rose by 8,500 positions in April 2026 alone, part of a cumulative gain of 49,700 jobs, or two per cent, since September 2025, according to Statistics Canada's Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours. On a year-over-year basis, the picture is even starker: healthcare and social assistance added roughly 119,000 jobs between April 2025 and April 2026, according to RBC Economics' analysis of Statistics Canada (StatCan) Labour Force Survey data – a gain of more than four per cent that, RBC noted, meant total Canadian employment would otherwise have contracted by 52,000 jobs over that period.
A growing sector but a steady economic share
The care sector is the largest employer across Canada, with more than three million Canadians employed in the sector as of May 2026 – just ahead of wholesale and retail trade – equal to about 14 per cent of the national workforce, according to StatCan.
However, despite the growing need for healthcare with an aging population, the sector generates a disproportionately small share of national economic output – about eight per cent of GDP in 2025, while the finance, real estate, and insurance sector created more than 20 per cent with half as many people employed in it, according to StatCan.
That mismatch – rapid job creation paired with comparatively low wages and thin GDP contribution – is creating a gap in investment and pipelines when the sector needs it the most, forcing HR leaders in healthcare to rethink how they recruit, retain, and make the business case for investment in their people.
A workforce growing faster than its investment
Ilona Dougherty, managing director of the Youth & Innovation Project at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ont., says the wage gap between traditionally male-dominated trades and female-dominated care roles is a direct driver of the healthcare and social assistance sector's staffing struggles. “A big reason why those roles are hard to fill is because they're not paid very well,” says Dougherty.
Dougherty adds that closing that gap would require deliberate policy choices, given there’s also a gap in investment in the care sector and others such as manufacturing and trades. “It would be a meaningful commitment to increase the wages of folks who are in the care sector,” she says. “A young man going into trades is going to make way more money than a young woman who is going to go and be a child-care provider.”
The economics of the healthcare and social assistance sector are unavoidable if employers want to close staffing gaps as retirements start coming, according to Dougherty. “In terms of demand and supply, you're not going to have the workers you need if they're not well supported,” she says.
That structural tension – a sector that employs armies of workers but contributes a comparatively small share to GDP – is something Dougherty says HR and business leaders need to reframe rather than resolve through GDP metrics alone. “We need to understand that it's not a one-to-one in terms of contributing to GDP,” she says, pointing to the unpaid and paid care work that underpins the broader labour market.
A pressured pipeline of skilled talent
Many jobs in the care sector are skilled professions, but there’s an issue with the pipeline that stems in part from an inequity of investment, according to Kendra Strauss, a professor and labour researcher at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC. “Why are masculinized jobs [such as trades and manufacturing] often seen as the jobs we need to invest in?” she says. “Why are we not encouraging men to go into professions where we have these huge gaps – it's not as if the skills required for nursing, for example, are somehow skills that only women have, in the same way that being an electrician isn’t something that only men can do.”
Another big issue for healthcare is credentialization, says Strauss. “Our economy loses a huge amount in productivity, for example, through deskilling,” she says. “We've spent decades recruiting migrant workers in sectors like health care, but also in domestic care – we have people who are trained as nurses coming from countries like the Philippines and India – but the barriers to credential recognition are so high that we’re losing those skills, even when we’re desperate for nurses in Canada.”
Strauss believes that governments are starting to recognize the credential problem, “but it's a very slow catch-up process.”
Building an employee value proposition around purpose
At Homewood Health in Guelph, Ont., Angela Slade, Executive Vice-President of People and Culture, says competing for both clinical and non-clinical talent has pushed the organization to lean harder into employer branding and purpose. "We’re increasingly looking at how we can work on our branding and leverage our purpose,” Slade says, describing conversations with staff who chose Homewood specifically because their work touched patient care, even in non-clinical roles. She says identity-driven recruitment strategy focusing on helping patients extends across the organization.
“That applies pretty easily to our clinical roles, and we're really trying to work on that identity and leveraging that alignment to our purpose,” she says. “The range of what we do across clinical and our non-clinical roles as well, we're finding that it really gets us the right talent, even in sales.”
Slade believes that strong HR leadership in the sector comes from being a business partner tied directly to outcomes, not overhead. “HR may be a cost centre, but we’re not a support function,” she says. “We’re partnering in a healthcare environment that’s directly connected to patient and client outcomes.”
Workforce planning for an aging, tenured workforce
Homewood, like many healthcare employers, is also confronting a demographic reality: a workforce skewed older than the national average, even as demand climbs. Slade says the organization is in the early stages of a formal workforce planning initiative aimed at anticipating retirement waves rather than reacting to them. “We still have a strong number of tenured people across our organization and we're on a clock now,” she says. To manage the eventual transition, Slade says they partner with schools to create student placements and internal mentorship programs as ways to bring in “younger, newer, novice workers” while retaining institutional knowledge.
According to Slade, internal data can help build the business case for continued investment in learning and development in the sector, such as uptake of career investment programs and outcomes of student placement programs. Such investment is key to support the growing workforce in an industry with a growing demand for its services, says Slade.
For Strauss, dealing with the challenge of increasing demand and jobs in the care sector requires a perspective that doesn’t simply tie investment into economic infrastructure. “We think of a hospital as infrastructure, but if a hospital has no doctors and nurses, it doesn't heal anyone, and so when we think about it in those terms, investing in healthcare workers is investing in one of our vital infrastructures,” she says. “But it's challenging in an environment where it’s always couched in relation to the deficit – and one of the ironies is that we almost never talk about the massive subsidies that go into, for example, our energy sector, but it's not talked about in the same way as the public money that goes into health care, and it's very hard to know what will shift that narrative.”
Strauss says she believes that executives and HR leaders must continue to argue that investments in people and talent development for the sector go beyond share of GDP, because the underlying support for economic investment is people.
“Without those investments, our essential services just simply won't be fit for the future,” she says.
