Dr. Sophia Halassy couldn’t be happier. The 32-year old bilingual obstetrician-gynecologist is settling into a new job at the Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Centre in Moncton, helping to tackle a years-long waiting list of patients.
This is a homecoming for Halassy, her husband and their two young daughters. After more than a decade of medical school, residency and employment in the United States, she was eager to get her family back on Canadian soil.
While Halassy had long harboured hopes of returning to her native New Brunswick, it was the swing to the political right in the U.S. that provided the final push, she said. The reversal of the landmark 1973 case Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion in the U.S., was a turning point for her.
“That was in 2022, and I know the time exactly because I just had my daughter. And I think at that point it was very scary,” she said, referring to the future of women’s reproductive rights in the United States.
Those fears continued to grow with the Trump administration’s drive to root out what it perceives to be liberal bias in medical research, which has led to the firing of trained health-care workers, medical technicians and researchers.
Many others are leaving in frustration because of what they consider to be an anti-science agenda championed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services.
Cuts to funding for Medicaid, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health are pushing more physicians like Halassy back across the border.
“I felt safe where we were [in New York], but I don’t think that will stand for other parts of the country unfortunately,” she said.
“We’re very humbled to be back in a place that feels a bit more safe in that department.”
Amid a flurry of medical migration from the U.S., physician-poor provinces such as New Brunswick are scrambling to welcome doctors from south of the border.
Sean Hatchard, spokesperson for the Department of Health, said in a statement that the province has been “actively recruiting in the United States, especially for hard-to-fill physician specialist positions.”
As of March 1, 2025, there were 389 full-time equivalent physician positions vacant in New Brunswick — 192 in family medicine and another 197 for other specialties.
In obstetrics and gynecology, just two vacant positions are listed on the government website, one in Bathurst and another in Moncton, and Halasssy said that’s not enough.
Even for an experienced obstetrician-gynecologist like Halassy, it took years to find a position in New Brunswick. And when her current job did come up, there were no guarantees.
“I really had to sell myself, like a billboard of what I can provide,” she said. “It’s very different versus somewhere like in America, where you’re interviewing them, they’re not interviewing you.”
She said given the turmoil in the U.S., the province would benefit from reducing red tape and making more positions available.
There are several other specialties with a single New Brunswick vacancy, including dermatology, internal medicine, urology, orthopedic surgery, vascular surgery and physical rehabilitation.
Dr. Stan Kutcher, professor emeritus with the faculty of medicine at Dalhousie University and a Nova Scotia senator, said Canada has a way of “making things as complicated as we can” for no reason.”
“If Canada wants to attract — and I argue that we must attract — people who value what Canadians value, who want to live in a country that has a solid democratic system, who want to live in a country in which we appreciate and support knowledge, we appreciate and support science, we have to break down the barriers that are stopping them from coming.”
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Kutcher said roadblocks in medical licensure and immigration are the biggest barriers he sees.
“Frankly, I don’t think that we should wait until someone goes through their usual immigration processes because we have a crisis at this time. Surely to goodness we would be able to make special pathways for people who we need here, people who have this incredible kind of expertise that will benefit Canada.”
For her part, Halassy has no regrets about returning to New Brunswick. “There’s no better place than Canada” to practice medicine, she said, and it comes without some of the moral dilemmas she faced in the United States.
“How do you refuse a patient access to care if they don’t have insurance? How do you say No to somebody who might be dying from cancer?”
“That should never be a choice for any patient … and for me that was the big selling feature to Canada,” she said. “Everybody gets the care that they need.”
