Practice Opportunities Across Canada

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA - We are recruiting a GP for this special clinic that serves an under-privileged patient population. While most patients are families, it will be helpful if you have experience with addiction issues. You will work with a team of four other GP's, a psychiatrist, social worker and nurse. Estimated gross earnings are $400,000 (£235,000) with a 30% overhead contribution. This clinic owner has very high standards for patient treatment. Secure parking included. Ask us to see a video of this medical clinic!

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA - Psychiatrist - In Canada, our clinics are what would be called surgeries in the UK. Most clinics are privately owned. However, psychiatrists, like most doctors, are paid by the government health system on a fee for service basis. You have considerable flexibility in how you practice as a psychiatrist and the gross earnings can be very substantial. Secure parking included.

WINNIPEG, MANITOBA - Work Monday to Friday in this large 61 exam room medical clinic, and you set your own hours. Clinic owners are family physicians. Their model is about supporting physicians supporting their patients. The clinic owners project your annual earnings to be $350,000 to $450,000 CDN working 4.5 days each week. Onsite specialists, Lab, Pharmacy, and Physiotherapist. Major hospital is across the street. This medical clinic has been in operation for over 50 years and has an excellent reputation in the community, and Winnipeg has lower housing costs than other major cities in Canada.
BONUS: This clinic will reimburse up to $12,000 for relocation costs.
Ask us to see a video of this medical clinic!

EDMONTON, ALBERTA - General Practitioner -If you have, or soon will have your LMCC then we have an opening with gross billings of more than $500,000 (£300,000) per year. This a very busy clinic with 26 exam rooms and 13 physician offices. You and your family will enjoy low housing prices ($400,000 average compared to $1.2 million in Toronto) and some of the most beautiful recreational opportunities for hiking and skiing in the nearby Rocky Mountains of Canada. Ask to see a video of the clinic.

WHITBY, ONTARIO - Fabulous opportunity for a GP in search of a small quiet town of 140,000 people, with bonuses. Whitby is on the northern shore of Lake Ontario ( just 60 km from Toronto) and enjoys a bustling harbour, good schools and nearby universities, and housing prices lower than Toronto. Clinic owner estimates your earnings to be $350,000 CDN.
BONUS #1: Clinic owner will guarantee $1,000 take home pay per business day you practice, for 90 days, to ensure you are off to a smooth transition in Canada.
BONUS #2: Clinic owner will pay up to $2,000 for reimbursement of exam fees.
Ask us to see a video of this medical clinic!

TORONTO, ONTARIO - We have numerous openings for general practitioners in TORONTO and the Greater Toronto area. These positions offer appointments only or a mix of appointment patients and walk-ins. Either way, your gross billings will be up to £265,000 working eight hours a day. No home visits. No hospital visits. These clinics are all large, brightly lighted, clean and professional with great access for patients. You can work in downtown Toronto or within 90 minutes drive. The cost of living decreases the further you are away from the city center.

VANCOUVER FRASER - Join three other GP's, with no weekends, house calls, or out of office work. Adjacent pharmacy means convenience for your patients and helps increase your number of regular patient. Salary is fee-for-service (you bill the provincial government for each patient service, so the more patients you see, the more you earn, it is your choice). No home, late nights or hospital visits. Collaborative support in your practice with fellow GP's. Practice eight hours a day. Office hours 8am to 6pm. Office with supportive clinic owner who is also a GP in the medical clinic. This is a great opportunity for a GP who desires a cosmopolitan lifestyle, and a healthy work-life balance in a big city in British Columbia. bLocated in Vancouver.

LANGLEY - In Langley, BC, (located 30 - 60 minutes' drive from Vancouver) in the Fraser Valley. We are recruiting a GP for a medical clinic in charming downtown Langley, which is owned by a former UK GP, and he will help make your transition to Canada easy. This medical clinic has 6 exam rooms, in office lab and x-rays, and cryotherapy treatments. Open Monday to Friday. Patients are a mix of families, professionals and seniors. A pharmacy is next door and you will collaborate with other GP's. Clinic owner estimates annual gross earnings of up to $500,000 CAD per year on fee-for-service (the more you work, the more you earn). No home and no hospital visits. This is a great opportunity for a GP who desires a small city, with lower housing costs than Vancouver. Langley offers great schools and a neighbourly community including year-round urban and forest hiking, mountain biking, salmon fishing, golf, equestrian trails, community arts and more. One library, 35 public schools, one Francophone school, two university campuses.

Proposed New Compensation for doctors in British Columbia

Across Canada there is a movement afoot to increase compensation for doctors. In every province there is a different amount of compensation, often reflecting different demographics, government budgets and political will.

In BC, the most recent agreement was for three years. With inflation, a doctor's income was not keeping up. There is also an issue in most provinces about a doctor not being paid for extra time spent on "administrative" issues.

As well, doctors currently working as full-time hospitalists are being paid approximately $300,000 per annum without overhead costs. The new agreement proposes that family doctors (GPs) will be paid about the same as a hospitalist, after paying for overhead contributions to a practice. The new base rate will be $385,000 with at least $85,000 going towards the overhead contribution. A doctor will still be able to increase their income by seeing fee-for-service patients. There will no longer be any cap on the number of patients seen. There is an invalid comparison that income will increase from $250,000 per annum to $385,000. The $250,000 represent an average income of part-time, semi-retired, and full-time family doctors.

Some doctors have expressed to me that they are concerned about the increase in admin work completing reports for the government. In the province of Ontario, similar compensation models have been implemented with mixed comments by physicians. Having to prove that a doctor's patients are having an improvement in their health can be time consuming, therefore many doctors prefer the fee-for-service model where their income can be considerably higher.

The proposed new agreement attempts to resolve many of the issues. The agreement will be put to a vote for ratification by BC doctors in the near future. If ratified, the new compensation model is expected to be in place in February 2023. Read a news article here: Proposed doctor's compensation in BC

Muslim Homebuyers Flock to Halal Financing Option

We are often asked if Halal mortgages are available in Canada. So, we decided to reprint this article from Canada's prestigious Globe and Mail Newspaper. A subscription is strongly recommended for those physicians coming to Canada.

Canada's housing market is in retreat, but in some provinces there's an emerging niche where demand for home loans is still booming: Halal financing for Muslim homebuyers.

More than a million Canadians identify as Muslim, but they are disproportionately renters and many have felt shut out of the country's real-estate market. That is because practising Muslims are prohibited by their faith from paying or receiving interest, which prevents them from taking conventional mortgages.

In Edmonton, a new startup, Canadian Halal Financial Corp., is trying to meet some of the demand for home ownership in Alberta's Muslim community. The company was founded by Thomas Lukaszuk, a former provincial MLA and cabinet minister, and John Stainton, a businessman and lawyer.

The two have worked closely with the Al Rashid Mosque, a local mainstay, to create an alternate type of mortgage that they say meets strict religious standards. The company has approved 600 applications since its launch last December, with more than a dozen new requests coming in each week.

"This is the fastest growing segment of the Canadian population that was excluded from Canada's real-estate market," Mr. Lukaszuk said. "It's extremely, personally, very rewarding. But it took a lot of effort."

Islamic finance isn't new, but it exists in a fragmented patchwork across the country and has yet to enter the financial mainstream. Many providers of halal mortgages are concentrated in Ontario, and some have operated in a religious grey zone without much oversight or a consistent set of standards, unlike the halal food industry, which is tightly regulated.

Opinion: Embracing Islamic finance presents an opportunity for Canada

Canadian Halal Financial positions itself as a credible provider of mortgages that comply with Islamic principles on the authority of two fatwas - a form of religious edict - from respected Muslim authorities. That includes one from a committee at Al Rashid, Canada's oldest mosque and a prominent hub in Edmonton.

One of the mosque's leaders, Imam Mahmoud Omar, travelled to Egypt and to get approval from scholars at Al Azhar University, one of the world's oldest sources of Islamic jurisprudence. The fatwa that Al Azhar granted to Canadian Halal Financial is the first for a North American company.

Yet it took years of discussions, and six-figure legal bills, to reach that point, responding to pressure from the mosque's congregation about the need for a halal way to buy a home in Alberta.

"They approached the Imams, they said ... 'we cannot rent forever, so find us a solution,'" Mr. Omar said in an interview.

At first, leaders at Al Rashid had discussions with credit unions and banks locally. But those institutions concluded that they couldn't create a compliant product and keep it separate from their core business lending and taking deposits based on interest, Mr. Lukaszuk and Mr. Omar said. As a result, they wouldn't be considered halal.

The Al Rashid mosque then turned to Mr. Lukaszuk, who had done business building new homes after he left politics, where he met Muslim clients looking for a way to finance new construction. It took two years of meetings with lawyers and scholars to draft contracts that complied both with provincial and Islamic laws. And there were times when Mr. Lukaszuk thought it "would be impossible."

When the company launched, "it was a big hit and big news," Mr. Omar said.

"Imagine that when someone is renting for the past 20 years and it's like, finally, you guys made it possible for me to own my house. It was an emotional time."

The company offers two types of halal financing. Both require a down payment of at least 25 per cent, regular payments until the home is fully paid for and charge a fee over and above the price of the home that is not based on interest rates.

"It is okay from a religious perspective for us to make a profit, but this profit cannot be interest-based," Mr. Lukaszuk said.

By far the most popular type of contract is musharakah, a form of partnership similar to a lease-to-own structure. The buyer's name is on the title to the home, the amortization period can be up to 30 years and there is flexibility to make early lump-sum payments. Also available is a more traditional murabaha contract, which has a shorter term up to 15 years and payments that are locked in.

One buyer, Nadeem Rahman, came to Canada in 1998, and lived in and around the Greater Toronto Area for the next 14 years. In 2006, he bought a home through a now-defunct halal financing company that didn't last, and sold it before he moved to Edmonton in 2012. He had been renting ever since, until he found Canadian Halal Financial through the Al Rashid mosque, which has a program to sign up prospective clients.

With financing from the company, Mr. Rahman bought a larger home in Edmonton where he lives with his wife, daughter and son, with room for extended family to visit. After property taxes, it costs about the same as the smaller town home he was previously renting, he said. He likened having a mortgage from a company recognized by his mosque and Al Azhar to having a prescription signed by a doctor.

"I can take this medicine," he said. "It takes the burden away from us. It gives a very big and strong confidence going with them. ... It's just like a big door opened for a lot of people."

The structures of Islamic financing sometimes walk a fine line. Canadian Halal Financial's contracts can only have two parties - the company and the buyer, with no involvement from other financial institutions or insurers. The company cannot mix its funds with interest-bearing products, but it can raise capital or take credit lines to fund its business from financial institutions, including banks, pension funds or private wealth funds.

"We are the buffer and there is no direct contact between our investors," Mr. Lukaszuk said.

The question each time a new Islamic finance provider launches in Canada is, "Are they halal or not?" said Dr. Mohamad Sawwaf, founder and chief executive officer of Toronto-based Islamic financial institution Manzil, who has a doctorate in Islamic finance.

His company follows standards set by the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions, a Bahrain-based non-profit. It sets rules about structuring products and governance that require a company to have an expert supervisory board, internal and external auditors, and regularly updated certifications or fatwas.

"This can be done in the right way," Dr. Sawwaf said.

Strong and consistent standards will be critical as demand for halal mortgages grows in Canada, and more financing providers start up to meet that need. Canadian Halal Financial is fielding an increasing number of inquiries from outside Alberta, and the company is considering opening offices in Ontario, B.C. and Quebec in the near term.

At Manzil in Toronto, the waiting list has 12,000 families who want financing to buy homes and the company would need another $6-billion in funding to serve them all.

"We have a mismatch when it comes to supply and demand," the Manzil CEO said.

Remembrance Day in Canada

Honouring our heroes — past and present

On November 11, we pay tribute to members of the Canadian Armed Forces who fought to defend our values and freedoms, and to those who continue to serve our country today.

Canadians recognize Remembrance Day, originally called Armistice Day, every 11 November at 11 a.m. It marks the end of hostilities during the First World War and an opportunity to recall all those who have served in the nation's defence.

Trouble Completing Your PhysiciansApply.ca Account?

As recruiters, we discovered that many physicians have difficulty supplying their information this online service. A simple error, like not scanning all four corners of a document can cause rejection. Which documents do you have notarized? How do you submit your documents?

We have created an explanatory video that is yours FREE, just by asking. Contact [email protected] to receive your link!

If you are serious about practicing medicine in Canada the first thing you should do is open an account with PhysiciansApply.ca. It is an online portal operated under the auspices of the Medical Council of Canada (similar to the GMC in the UK). Every doctor coming to Canada must have an account. This is where your credentials must be verified. These credentials include your passport, medical degrees and more. Every province and territory of Canada has a regulatory authority to handle physician licensing and these authorities (Colleges) will need to access your PhysiciansApply.ca account before you can be licensed in Canada.

Don't wait! Some documents can be verified quickly, and others may take some time, especially if you attended medical school in a country that is slow to respond to inquiries from Canada.

If you are an IMG, licensing in Canada as a physician simply does not happen without a PhysiciansApply.ca account.

MRCGP and Family Practice Exams in Canada

The College of Family Physicians of Canada is the recognized licensing authority for family physicians in Canada. Those physicians coming from the UK, Ireland, Australia, or the USA will usually not have to write the examination required to practice as a General Practitioner in Canada. Verification of your MRCGP, MICGP, FRACGP, FACRRM, or DABFM will be required. For more information on this certification visit CFPC.ca and check out the Education and Professional Development section. Members in good standing will use the CCFP certification.

We like questions!

It's likely that you will have questions along your journey to practicing in Canada. Don't hesitate to contact John Livingstone at: [email protected]

Or call WhatsApp +1 250-885-8802 (9 AM - 6 PM Pacific Time)