Three Public PET Sites, One Cancer Queue: B.C. Needs the Scan-Capacity Ledger

Global News released a four-and-a-half-minute video on October 23 under a brutal headline: a Burnaby clinic medical director says patients are dying while waiting for PET scans in B.C. That allegation must be attributed carefully. It is not a court finding, and it is not a full system audit. But it is serious enough that B.C. cannot answer with slogans about future capacity.

BC Cancer’s own public referral page shows how narrow the public queue is. PET/CT scan referrals are directed to BC Cancer’s Vancouver, Kelowna or Victoria locations. The process is not patient shopping; doctors submit location-specific forms, and if the request meets BC Cancer’s current clinical indications, BC Cancer contacts the patient to book the scan.

That matters because PET/CT is not optional window dressing. BC Cancer describes PET combined with CT as imaging that helps physicians more accurately diagnose and manage disease, especially cancer. Its patient page says PET and CT together can help with preoperative staging and suspected recurrence when standard tests are inconclusive — exactly the kind of information that can change treatment planning.

The government record also confirms the scale problem. In its 2025 announcement about the new Quadra PET/CT scanner in Vancouver, BC Cancer said it provided 20,314 PET/CT scans in 2024/25 and that there were four publicly funded PET/CT scanners in B.C.: two in Vancouver, one in Victoria and one in Kelowna. The same release promised more scanners through future cancer-centre builds, including Surrey, Nanaimo and Burnaby, and said recruitment was underway to expand Vancouver capacity.

That is the NDP accountability gap. Future scanners do not help a patient whose referral is medically necessary now. A centralized three-city service may be administratively tidy, but the public deserves to know the actual wait-time ledger: referral volumes, clinical urgency bands, cancellations, scanner uptime, staffing shortages, and whether any qualified capacity outside the current BC Cancer queue could safely reduce delays.

This is not an argument to privatize cancer care by default. It is an argument against letting ideology hide operational failure. If a private-clinic medical director is publicly warning that patients are dying waiting for scans, the responsible public answer is a transparent capacity audit — not a talking point, not a ribbon-cutting, and not another promise attached to buildings years away.

David Eby’s health system repeatedly asked British Columbians to trust the plan. On cancer diagnostics, trust now requires proof: how long patients waited, why they waited, what capacity sat unused, and who in government knew the bottleneck was this severe.