One question that Jeremy and I hear a lot is "Why?"  Specifically, "Why did you move to Australia?" and then "Why did Jeremy apply to study in Australia?"  It's a long story, but it can be summed up pretty quickly in a few sentences.  I think most people who read this are aware of why we came over here, maybe not all the details, but have a general understanding. 

I've been thinking about this topic for awhile, and something triggered it even more yesterday evening when we had a few people over for a BBQ.  This wasn't on purpose, but there ended up being quite a few Canadians there.  The subject of applying to medical school in Canada came up, and a few of them said that they didn't even bother.  One guy, whose father is a surgeon, said he mentioned to his GP that he was planning on applying to medicine and the GP laughed in his face and told him it was a waste of time and money to even apply.  So this morning, I decided to do a bit more reading up on it.  I googled "Canadians studying medicine overseas" and a few interesting articles/blogs/letters to the editor came up:

http://deptmed.queensu.ca/blog/?p=266

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/too-many-canadians-studying-medicine-overseas-1.993980

http://www.industrymailout.com/Industry/LandingPage.aspx?id=851443&p=1

http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2010/09/20/want-medical-degree-will-travel/

As I was reading, I thought about one of the times I was visiting Canada, when someone said to their child (grown up child) in front of me: "Well, you better study hard or else you'll be stuck going to Australia to do post-graduate studies."  Okay, for one thing, this was just plain rude, as my husband was studying in Australia at the time and I was in Canada securing loans for the master's in speech pathology that I had just been accepted into (and was very excited about!)  It seemed like they were implying that we hadn't studied/worked hard enough and so we had no choice but to go to Australia...and let me tell you, Jeremy in particular had worked his ass off to get into Canadian med programs before applying to Australia. Secondly, I guess that comment also demonstrated an ignorance or unawareness of the Canadian medical school system, applications, statistics, etc.  If you click on the links above, you'll see an underlying theme which indicates that the system in Canada is fundamentally flawed and that for every one person who is admitted into a Canadian medical school, there are three EQUALLY QUALIFIED people who are rejected.  The difference may be something as fractional as half a percentage point.   

So yes...I find it hard to condense my answer when asked these questions, and also a bit difficult to portray the Canadian post-grad system for doctors/allied health in a positive light.  Canada needs to wake up.  Not to mention, Jeremy and I are extremely privileged that we had the chance to pursue this here in Australia.  Now, I can't imagine it any other way.