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Introduction: The Real Cost and Impact of Refugee Healthcare in Canada

With Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party trying to make refugee healthcare costs in Canada a central part of their healthcare and anti-immigrant policy Canadians should know what the data actually shows. The Conservatives have tabled a motion to strip health benefits from what they call “fake refugees,” framing the Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP) as a major drain on the system and claim that tackling this will help Canadian healthcare. So how much does refugee healthcare actually cost? And how much of this goes to refugees that are ultimately denied the right to stay? Is this an honest and intelligent argument from Poilievre and the conservatives or another political distraction designed to increase hate and fear of immigrants? How does this even affect Canadian healthcare? Lets find out.

REMEMBER: An honest statement or claim is when, if the observer had all of the relevant facts and data available, they would come to the same conclusion regarding the evidence presented, as would a rational and competent individual. (See honesty vs truth).

Conservative Claims About Refugee Healthcare Costs in Canada

Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party is now loudly demanding cuts to the Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP), framing refugee healthcare as a drain on Canada’s system. The Conservative immigration policy motion specifically targets what Poilievre calls “deluxe” benefits for “fake refugees,” proposing to limit rejected asylum claimants to emergency and life-saving care only. As always we are going to use our standard arbiter of honesty to determine whether this is an honest and reasonable claim or complete and utter BS (or something in between).

The Facts: How Much Does Refugee Healthcare Cost Canada?

Refugee claimants, per capita, cost the healthcare system 83% less than the average Canadian. If we eliminated the entire IFHP, for all refugees, including those who have been approved and stopped providing medical care for every refugee (including all those from Ukraine & Syria), Canada’s healthcare spending would drop from $399 billion to $398.1 billion.

For those of you good with numbers that is a savings of 0.226%. You would not notice it. Nobody would notice it. Wait times wouldn’t be affected by a single day. There wouldn’t be more family doctors. Nothing would change. The Conservatives are making this fuss over a rounding error and distracting Canadians from real issues affecting our healthcare. It is noted in below but I put it here in bold because conservatives don’t like reading full documents: the 0.2% doesn’t represent the people the Conservatives claim are abusing the system, the 0.2% includes everyone on the program. Scroll down to Are Rejected Refugee Claimants ‘Gaming the System to see the actual scale of the issue.

What is Actually Driving Canada’s Healthcare Crisis?

The structural underfunding of provincial healthcare, the family doctor shortage, and the chronic gap between federal transfer growth and actual spending growth are what’s breaking the system. Half of all Canadians now report difficulty accessing a family doctor or not having one at all. These are not immigrant problems. They are governance and funding problems that predate the current asylum surge by decades — and no Conservative immigration policy targeting refugee healthcare will fix them.

Are Rejected Refugee Claimants ‘Gaming the System’?

The most politically charged claim central to Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative motion on refugee healthcare is that rejected refugee claimants, people who have been told to leave, are gaming the healthcare system. Here’s what the evidence actually shows.

• Rejected claimants retain IFHP coverage only while exhausting their legal right to appeal.
• Of those that appeal nearly one third (30.6%) of claimant appeals decided on the merits in 2024, were granted due to the original rejection being wrong in law or fact.¹ The system itself acknowledges it makes errors — regularly.
• In 2025, 63% of finalized refugee claims were accepted by Canadian immigration adjucators.² The majority of people in this program are not “bogus.”
• The best available estimate for rejected-claimant healthcare costs, extrapolated from IRCC expenditure data³ and the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s per-person cost figures⁴ is roughly $100–150 million annually. That is 0.025–0.037% of Canada’s total healthcare spending of $399 billion.⁵ It is a rounding error in a $399 billion system.

Why Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives Are Targeting Refugee Healthcare

The IFHP’s cost growth is real — it went from $211 million in 2020–21 to $896 million in 2024–25.⁶ But the Parliamentary Budget Officer is explicit about the cause: processing backlogs, not benefit expansion.⁷ More people in the system means higher expenditure. The solution to that is more adjudicators and faster processing, not stripping healthcare from some of the most vulnerable people in Canada simply to score political points.

When Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative immigration policy focuses relentlessly on 0.2% of the healthcare budget⁸ while 6.5 million Canadians can’t find a family doctor,⁹ the question worth asking isn’t about refugee healthcare costs in Canada. It’s about what ‘problem’ the Conservatives are actually trying to solve, if any. It certainly seems to any competent and rational observer that this is just an extension of the anti-immigrant sentiment Canada’s Conservatives are so desperately spreading in a bid to be like their friends in the south. Why just this month they ran another false and misleading campaign trying to spread fear of immigrants.

Now you know. Please share this with any Canadian who doesn’t already realize the racist, fascist nature of today’s Conservative Party.

Data current as of February 2026.

Related Articles

• Conservatives Run Dog Whistle Campaign About Immigrants — How the Conservative Party used misleading crime statistics to stoke fear of immigrants.
• What is Danielle Smith’s ‘Immigration’ Policy? — Alberta’s Premier demanded more immigrants, then blamed Ottawa when they arrived. The Conservative immigration hypocrisy runs deep.
• How to Spot Fascism — When politicians scapegoat vulnerable minorities to distract from systemic failures, what does that remind you of?
• Misinformation vs Disinformation vs Malicious Stupidity — Understanding the difference between being wrong, lying, and not caring enough to check.
• One in 2 Canadian Conservatives Self Identify as Cowardly Traitors — 47% of Conservative Party members would surrender Canadian sovereignty to the United States.

1. https://refugeelab.ca/refugee-claim-data-2024/
2. https://www.ayodelelaw.ca/blog/refugee-claims-canada-2025-acceptance-vs-rejection
3. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/transparency/committees/cimm-nov-25-2024/interim-federal-health-program.html
4. https://www.pbo-dpb.ca/en/publications/RP-2526-023-C–projecting-cost-interim-federal-health-program–prevision-cout-programme-federal-sante-interimaire
5. https://www.cihi.ca/en/national-health-expenditure-trends/nhex-trends-reports/nhex-trends-2025-snapshot
6. https://www.pbo-dpb.ca/en/publications/RP-2526-023-C–projecting-cost-interim-federal-health-program–prevision-cout-programme-federal-sante-interimaire
7. https://www.pbo-dpb.ca/en/publications/RP-2526-023-C–projecting-cost-interim-federal-health-program–prevision-cout-programme-federal-sante-interimaire
8. https://migrantrights.ca/media-briefing-note-conservative-motion-and-liberal-changes-to-refugee-health-care-fact-check-and-context/
9. https://www.cma.ca/how-health-care-funded-canada