The program will be expanding starting in the 2026-27 academic year. Pictured: Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Photo Credit: Doug Ford/X.
The Ontario government announced on Oct. 25 that they will be expanding their Learn and Stay Grant Program to provide full tuition grants to Ontario students who wish to become family doctors.
The program will be expanding starting in the 2026-27 academic year and will “cover all tuition and other direct educational costs like books, supplies, and equipment in exchange for a term of service as a physician in any community across Ontario.”
The government is investing an estimated $88 million over three years to expand the grants and will provide them to 1,360 eligible undergraduate students that “commit to practice family medicine with a full roster of patients once they graduate.”
Currently, the Learn and Stay Grant is only available to those studying specific nursing, paramedic, and medical laboratory technology/medical laboratory science programs in “underserved and growing communities in Northern, Southwestern, and Eastern Ontario.”
The grant requires Ontario students to go to school in a particular region and then commit to at least 180 days (six months) for every full year of study funded by the grant.
The North region includes the following public health units (PHUs): Thunder Bay, Sudbury, North Bay-Parry Sound, Northwestern, Timiskaming, Porcupine, and Algoma.
The East region includes the PHUs of: Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox, and Addington, Eastern Ontario, Ottawa, Leeds, Grenville and Lanark, Renfrew County, and Hastings Prince Edward Counties.
And the Southwest region includes the PHUs of: Huron Perth, Oxford, Elgin, St. Thomas, Southwestern, Lambton, Middlesex-London, Chatham-Kent, Windsor-Essex County, Grey-Bruce, and Haldimand-Norfolk.
It should be emphasized that this new expansion of the Learn and Stay Grant for family doctors would allow them to work anywhere in Ontario and would not restrict them to a specific region.
The Ontario government also announced that they will be bringing forward a bill that will require “all Ontario medical schools to allocate at least 95 per cent of all undergraduate medical school seats to residents of Ontario, with the other five per cent reserved for students from the rest of Canada” starting in the fall of 2026.
The move would effectively bar international students from Ontario undergraduate medical school seats, including at McMaster University’s Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine in Hamilton.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford said at a news conference that “18 per cent of students from around the world are taking our kids’ seats and then not even staying here and going back to their country.”
A Government of Ontario press release says that their actions are “designed to ensure Ontario medical schools are training and graduating doctors, including family doctors, who are significantly more likely to practice in Ontario.”
The Ontario government is hoping that these measures will help to close the gap of the remaining 10 per cent of Ontarians who do not have access to a regular healthcare provider.
They are already opening two new medical schools at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University and have expanded medical school seats, undertaking the largest medical school expansion in over a decade.
The Ontario government’s Practice Ready Ontario program is also expected to add up to 100 internationally-trained physicians to rural areas by the end of 2025-26.
Based in Hamilton, he reaches hundreds of thousands of people monthly on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. He has been published in The Hamilton Spectator, Stoney Creek News, and Bay Observer. He has also been a segment host with Cable 14 Hamilton. In 2017, he received the Chancellor Full Tuition Scholarship from the University of Ottawa (BA, 2022). He has also received the Governor General’s Academic Medal. He formerly worked in a non-partisan role on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
