Canada has long prided itself on being a refuge for people fleeing war, persecution, torture, and violence. Yet recent federal changes to the Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP) risk undermining that humanitarian commitment by placing new barriers between refugees and the health care they desperately need.

The federal government’s decision to impose a 30 per cent co-payment on supplemental health services and introduce a 10-hour annual cap on mental health counselling for asylum seekers and refugee claimants is both short-sighted and unjust. While Ottawa argues that these measures are necessary to ensure the program’s long-term sustainability, the human and social costs of these cuts are likely to far outweigh any projected savings.

Mental health care is not a luxury for many refugees. It is often an essential lifeline. Individuals arriving in Canada after fleeing conflict, imprisonment, persecution, or torture frequently carry deep psychological wounds. Recovery from such trauma rarely fits within a neat 10-hour timeline. Therapists who work directly with refugee populations warn that the first several sessions may be spent simply building trust before meaningful treatment can even begin. Limiting care to ten hours per year ignores the realities of trauma recovery and substitutes bureaucratic convenience for clinical judgment.

The stories of former refugees such as Andrew Gibson and Amir Sedaghati-pour illustrate what is at stake. Both required far more than ten hours of counselling to overcome the effects of trauma and successfully rebuild their lives in Canada. Their experiences demonstrate that effective mental health support can lead to improved integration, educational achievement, employment, and civic participation. These are not merely personal victories; they are investments that benefit Canadian society as a whole.

The new co-payment requirement is equally troubling. For many refugee claimants, even modest fees can be prohibitive. A person struggling to secure housing, food, transportation, and legal representation may simply forgo counselling, dental care, vision care, or necessary medications when faced with additional costs. Delayed treatment often leads to more severe health problems, greater suffering, and increased reliance on emergency medical services—ultimately costing taxpayers more.

What makes these changes particularly concerning is the lack of transparency surrounding their implementation. Mental health practitioners report learning about the counselling cap through emails from Medavie Blue Cross rather than direct government communication. Meanwhile, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has provided limited evidence explaining why a 10-hour cap was chosen or how much money it is expected to save. Policymakers should not be making decisions that affect vulnerable populations without clearly demonstrating the rationale behind them.

Canada has been down this road before. In 2012, cuts to refugee health coverage sparked widespread opposition from health professionals and were ultimately struck down by the courts as discriminatory and harmful. The lesson from that episode should have been clear: balancing budgets on the backs of vulnerable newcomers is neither morally defensible nor fiscally wise.

A sustainable health system is important. But sustainability cannot come at the expense of compassion, evidence-based care, and basic human dignity. The federal government should reverse the 10-hour counselling cap, reconsider the co-payment scheme, and reaffirm Canada’s commitment to protecting those who arrive on our shores seeking safety and hope.

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