Trust is not just the defining theme of 2026 in Canadian healthcare; it is increasingly the lens through which Canadians are judging the system itself. New Environics Research data shows that 60% of Canadians believe the healthcare system is deteriorating or in crisis, including 22% who say it is in crisis outright. Just 36% describe the system as basically good, and only 5% say it is excellent. Those numbers suggest that trust is no longer a soft metric or a secondary concern. Many Canadians already feel they are relying on a system they do not fully trust to work when they need it most.
Looking back at our 2025 Trends Article, we were right about the direction of travel. The latest available data, published after that prediction, shows that 5.7 million Canadian adults still didn’t have a regular healthcare provider. Anecdotal reports from 2025 show no signs that this shortage is easing. At the same time, care pathways continue to shift quickly: CIHI reports that in 2019, virtual care accounted for 2%–11% of patient services, depending on province while Statistics Canada found that one-third of Canadians reported receiving primary care virtually in 2023. Together, these trends point to a system in which traditional access challenges remain unresolved even as Canadians are increasingly relying on new and more flexible ways to connect with care.
Where we missed the mark was public and political scrutiny. We expected Canadian healthcare to be more central to the national agenda, but economic anxiety and geopolitical worries crowded out almost everything else. In hindsight, the most telling signal was how easily healthcare got crowded out, even while access pressures worsened. That disconnect is exactly what sets up 2026: when people continue to feel the system is getting harder to navigate but don’t see clear leadership, they start asking a different question. Not: “what’s the plan?” but “who can I rely on?”
That’s why we think trust will be the defining theme of 2026; and healthcare is where that question becomes most personal. Trust is already in decline. According to the Environics Institute, the share of Canadians who say they trust neither the federal nor provincial government to manage the healthcare system rose from 15% (2019) to 28% (2024). And the information environment people rely on is fraying too: only 15% say they have “a lot” of trust in mass media, while 1 in 4 say they don’t trust it at all (up from 1 in 5 in 2010).
So while 2026 may not introduce an entirely new set of trends, we do think it changes the stakes. This is the year familiar pressures start being judged through one overriding lens: whether the system is earning trust by changing in ways people can actually feel. With that in mind, here are the trends we believe will define Canadian healthcare in 2026.
Trust becomes the operating system of healthcare reform
In 2026, expect trust to become the “system issue” underneath every other issue. When people believe the system is coherent and honest, even if it’s strained, they will tolerate trade-offs. When they don’t believe those things, every friction point becomes further proof that nothing is working.
Trust will be tested in three practical ways:
From Announcements to Proof
Canadians will only be persuaded by results that they can feel – not funding commitments or policy language. Overall, 63% of Canadians say the healthcare system’s problems are more a result of inefficient management than inadequate funding, reinforcing the idea that trust will be rebuilt through visible improvement, not announcements alone.
From Access to Navigation
Canadians won’t be focused only on the lack of resources, but also on what it actually feels like to find care: where you’re supposed to go, how many dead ends you hit, how often you have to repeat your story, and how much personal effort the system demands just to move one step forward. That burden is already showing up in people’s experiences: 14% of Canadians say they couldn’t get an appointment when they needed one.
From Expertise to Credibility
Canadians will scrutinize even previously trusted healthcare sources more closely, and when official communication feels vague or inconsistent, more people will look elsewhere for answers. Even now, trust in institutional health information sources sits below trust in frontline clinicians: 69% trust government health websites and 68% trust public health agencies, compared with 85% to 87% who trust doctors, pharmacists, nurses, and family doctors.
From appointments to continuity: the new trust test for primary care
The access crisis will remain front and centre – but the conversation in this area will evolve. As more people rely on a mix of walk-in clinics, pharmacists, nurse practitioners, and virtual care, the trust question becomes less about whether you got an appointment and more about whether your care feels continuous and coordinated.
That shift matters because fragmentation is not just frustrating — it is already changing behaviour. More than one in four Canadians say they self-treated or managed on their own, while others report using walk-in clinics, going to the ER instead, waiting until their condition got worse, or avoiding care altogether. In that environment, continuity becomes more than a quality issue; it becomes a trust issue.
In 2026, expect more focus on:
Team-based care models that reduce fragmentation and make care feel connected rather than episodic.
Smoother handoffs and better interoperability so information follows the patient – and people aren’t forced to repeat their story endlessly.
Navigation supports (and smart use of technology) that reduce the burden on patients, so they can focus on their health – not the process of getting care.
These practices will grow in importance because for many Canadians, what breaks trust in healthcare isn’t a single experience, it’s the repeated experience of being passed from provider to provider, re-explaining the same situation, and feeling like no one is accountable for connecting the dots.
AI grows up: from experimentation to accountability
If 2025 was the year Artificial Intelligence stopped feeling hypothetical, 2026 is the year it will be judged on something tougher than “innovation”: whether it earns public trust.
New research Environics conducted in Q4 of 2025 (as part of our IRIS Global Confidence Study) makes the trust dynamic clear. Canadians’ comfort with AI in healthcare isn’t about the technology alone – it’s shaped by how people feel about their own health and how much confidence they have in the healthcare system overall. When people feel healthier, comfort rises: acceptance of healthcare providers using AI climbs from 10.5% among those who rate their health as poor to 20.9% among those who say their health is very good. And when people see the system as stable rather than in crisis, comfort also rises – from 14.3% (system “in crisis”) to 20.3% (system “excellent”). We also see that the share who say they’re “not comfortable with AI in any context” drops sharply depending on system confidence – 56% when people see the system as in crisis vs. 28% when they rate it as excellent.
That hesitation is visible in the broader trust landscape as well. Overall, only 27% of Canadians say they have at least some trust in AI tools for health information, and Canada’s net AI optimism score sits at just 12%, well below the 24% global average
This means the 2026 story on AI isn’t just about adoption. It’s about using AI in ways that earn public trust: with governance, transparency, human oversight, and clear accountability. These imperatives are especially important when the system already feels fragile. The data also show that where Canadians want AI used depends on the mindset they’re bringing into healthcare. When they feel the system is in crisis, they want AI to reduce wait times and improve access; when they see the system as stable, they’re more focused on AI improving diagnostic accuracy.
The takeaway is simple: AI won’t scale in 2026 because it sounds impressive in theory. It will scale successfully if it feels safe, human-led, and shows results in the parts of the system Canadians are most frustrated by.
Health information becomes a trust and safety issue
An increasing number of healthcare decisions happen before someone ever reaches a clinic: symptom interpretation, treatment research, peer advice, influencer content, and algorithm-fed narratives. When the information environment becomes less trusted, people don’t stop making decisions – they just make them with less shared reality.
Canadians do not trust all health information sources equally: 85% to 87% trust clinicians, compared with 68% to 69% for public health and government sources, and just 15% to 21% for influencers, social media, and online forums.
In 2026, expect:
Stronger attention to misinformation as a patient safety issue.
More proactive public-facing education that doesn’t feel paternalistic.
Communications that acknowledge uncertainty honestly and without eroding confidence.
The most effective health communicators will show that sounding credible is not the same as sounding certain. And that claiming to be undeniably right might reassure some while alienating others.
Equity and prevention become inseparable trust tests
In 2026, expect equity to move from “important” to “non-negotiable” in terms of system legitimacy. If people see a system that consistently fails specific groups – whether because of geography, race, income, disability, or cultural safety – trust doesn’t only erode among those directly harmed but more broadly because the system no longer feels fair.
Those gaps are not abstract: racialized Canadians are more likely to rely on walk-in clinics and to give up on seeking care altogether, while cost remains a barrier for many, with 19% of Canadians paying out of pocket for prescription medication and 18% not taking medication or supplies because of cost.
The intersection of equity and prevention will also demand attention. Prevention will stay prominent, but the tone will likely shift; less aspirational wellness language, more pragmatic questions about what’s feasible, what’s supported, and what barriers exist to adopting preventive strategies in the first place. The uncomfortable truth is that prevention typically requires time, money, stability, and access.
If we want prevention to genuinely reduce system demand, it can’t be designed as an “ideal behaviour” strategy – it has to be built as an equity strategy.
Closing: Why trust will decide what works in 2026
2026 is not the year every healthcare problem gets solved. But we do think it’s the year the same pressures we’ve lived with for years start being interpreted through one overriding lens: trust.
Because when trust fails, every other reform becomes harder. People disengage, misinformation fills the gaps, staff burn out faster, and even good changes struggle to scale.
What Canadians say would rebuild trust is also practical rather than abstract:
If trust really is the defining theme of 2026, then understanding how different Canadians build (or lose) trust becomes essential. The same policy change, AI tool, or communications effort can land very differently depending on what people value: whether they default to deference or skepticism, whether they want autonomy or reassurance, whether they prioritize speed or safety.
This is exactly why we’re a strong advocate for integrating a values lens into research. Demographics can tell us who someone is on paper, but values help explain how they move through the world – what they believe, what they fear, what they’ll tolerate, what makes them feel respected, and what makes them shut down. In an environment where trust is fragile, those differences aren’t “nice-to-know” – they determine whether an idea that works in theory will work in real life.
PatientConnect is one way we’ve made that lens practical: it’s a values-based segmentation that helps turn psychographic differences into something leaders can actually use. It can be used to design care pathways, communication, and innovations that feel credible and relevant not just to “the average Canadian” but to actual Canadians.
If we want to build, rebuild, and maintain trust, it will take more than macro-level system fixes. We’ll need research and solutions grounded in how people actually think, decide, and behave – and that means building values into how we measure, design, and communicate about care.
