September 12, 2025

Dear members of the School of Medicine,

As you may have heard, the Fédération des médecins spécialistes du Québec (FMSQ) announced late yesterday that its members will cease all teaching and supervision activities for medical students as a pressure tactic in ongoing negotiations with the government, beginning Monday, September 15.

All our clinical faculty members are indispensable to the education of our medical students. We recognize and appreciate their essential role in training the next generation of physicians.

We are therefore very concerned about this call to specialist physicians to halt teaching. Students must be supervised in the clinical setting. If that supervision is unavailable, we will have no choice but to remove them from those settings.

For our students

 We know this news is concerning, for you and for us. We will do everything in our power to help get you through this.

  • For you, the work action means that students will see disruptions to learning activities in many clinical environments and in the classroom. 
  • We expect that the impact of this work action will vary from unit to unit, and from rotation to rotation.
  • We are developing contingency plans to address this rapidly evolving situation. You will receive an email later today with specific guidance about what to do on Monday.
  • Visiting electives for Canadian medical students from Sept 15-28, 2025 are cancelled.
  • If you find yourself in distress or otherwise need support, please reach out to the Office of Medical Learner Affairs.

For our residents

  • We expect that clinical faculty who are specialist physicians will continue to supervise residents, as usual.
  • Residents should continue their work as usual, including any prior commitments to on-campus teaching of medical students.

For the specialist physicians amongst our clinical faculty

We know how much you have stepped up in recent years—helping to train an increased cohort of medical students to meet Quebec’s growing health care needs.

  • We have urged the government to formally recognize and better support physicians in their critical roles as educators and supervisors – for example in our  on Projet de loi 106.
  • In the absence of your supervision, students will not be able to complete certain clinical rotations.

Where to get information

We expect the situation to change rapidly and commit to communicating as quickly as possible to keep you informed.

  • We will send regular updates via email.
  • This webpage will house email messages and announcements, FAQs (in the works) and contact emails.

We know you will have many questions – contact emails will be available on the webpage shortly. Information is in short supply and will evolve, so we ask for your patience. We will answer your questions to the best of our ability, either through the FAQ or directly.

We know this is a challenging situation. For our students, who are concerned about potential impacts on their education and for our clinical specialist faculty members who are devoted to training our students and who now find themselves in a difficult position. Together, I am confident we will get through this. We are working hard to mitigate the impact of these pressure tactics on our learners. We urge the Government and the Fédération to make every effort to resolve their differences quickly.

 

Lesley Fellows, MDCM, DPhil
Vice-President (Health Affairs)
Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences