More Canadians are leaving emergency departments before seeing a doctor: CBC's Marketplace cheat sheet

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If you ask Susan Gordon how much pain she was in this past June, on a scale from 1 to 10, she’d tell you it was a 15.

The 51-year-old from New Brunswick arrived at The Moncton Hospital by ambulance after experiencing sharp stomach pains and vomiting repeatedly.

But after spending more than three hours in a “chaotic” emergency waiting room, she left.

“From what I know now, I did put myself in jeopardy,” Gordon said.

She tried to tough it out through the pain, but it intensified for months — until she collapsed and ended up back in the emergency department in September, where she quickly underwent appendicitis surgery.

“It makes me feel like our system is broken,” Gordon said.

The number of people leaving the emergency department across the country has been on the rise in recent years.

Because B.C. And Quebec report these figures based on the fiscal calendar (and include parts of 2025), that number is likely a lot higher.

Horizon Health, which runs the Moncton Hospital, said in a statement that it doesn’t want patients to leave before being seen and that the long waits are a result of boarded patients waiting for beds in over-capacity hospitals. It also said it’s trying to find solutions under these challenging circumstances.

Read more from Marketplace journalists Bobby Hristova, Madeline McNair and Chris Glover.

When Anil Sedha decided to cancel his Rogers business internet service, he expected to go online, click a few buttons and be done. But the customer support link was broken. A chatbot told him he could only cancel by calling.

Thus began what the Winnipeg man estimates was a seven-hour ordeal spread over several weeks last summer, trapped in a maze of hold music, dropped calls and endless transfers between departments.

“It was a non-stop theme of ‘we are having a heavy call volume,’ ” said Sedha. “I tried calling at different times of the day and on different days.”

Sedha’s experience isn’t unique. Dozens of unhappy Rogers customers have recently written Go Public and posted on social media, complaining about long wait times, complicated cancellation procedures and poor service.

Many question recent Rogers call centre layoffs and complain about how three major providers — Rogers, Bell and Telus — dominate the industry. Together, they control the majority of the country's mobile, TV and internet market, a problem critics say was made more severe when Rogers was allowed to take over Shaw in 2023.

Customer service experts say this lack of competition is precisely the problem.

A spokesperson for Rogers declined to speak on camera, but said in a statement that the company has millions of customer interactions every month and works hard “to deliver a great experience.”

More than six years after a provincial report into money laundering warned about the rise of a so-called "grey market" exporting Canadian luxury cars to China, many of the insurance agents who processed paperwork enabling the shadowy deals are facing sanctions.

According to a series of disciplinary orders, the agents facilitated the purchase of one-year insurance policies on hundreds of Mercedes, BMWs and other luxury vehicles — knowing they were destined to be cancelled within days as the cars were shipped off to China.

In some cases, the agents even acted as so-called "straw buyers" themselves — purchasing high-end vehicles with money given to them to act as fronts for exporters.

You could get at least $50 from the bread price-fixing settlement. But the deadline is coming up

Applications must be in by Dec. 12

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Have you noticed any products at the supermarket that claim to be proudly Canadian, but you’re not convinced? If you've seen maple washing, we want to hear about it! Email us at marketplace@cbc.ca.

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