Waiting 6 months or more to see a specialist is pretty common... They’re likely calculating that a percentage of patients will expire and thus save them the high cost of treating serious illnesses.
Critical care in Canada is ok, but many other aspects of the healthcare system are substandard. If you have acute appendicitis, need Cancer treatment or are seriously injured in a car crash, the system responds quite well to your needs. Family medicine is very poor and many people cannot find a doctor. Non-critical surgery (hip and knee replacements, heart by-pass, cataracts) can take many months of waiting. And access to diagnostic imaging and consultations with specialists also involve lengthy waiting lines. The issue in Canada isn’t whether people should have access to government health care (that battle was lost 50 years ago), but the denial of the right to access private healthcare if you have the money to go that route. If the Communist Chinese and Vietnamese have a private health care system why can’t we?