I live in Québec.

If you want to go to a walk-in medical clinic without an appointment and see a doctor for an emergency, you have to register for an appointment online on a government website. Yes. You take an appointment for a no-appointment walk-in clinic emergency visit.

You have to know when EACH clinic posts its schedule for the next day (none of them post at the same time btw) so you can log in and TRY to get an appointment. But the system is so clogged up that it’s nearly impossible to get an appointment.

But I found a hack.

If you go to the emergency at the HOSPITAL - which doesn’t require an appointment - you can ask at the triage if you can be given an appointment the next day at a clinic near your home. They apparently have a priority access in the appointment system and can give you one. This way you wait one hour tops, and you get an appointment to see a doctor. That’s how I’ve done it the last couple of times.

In addition, in Québec we used to have local neighborhood public clinics called CLSC. They used to be like mini hospitals with a few services like the possibility of getting X-rays for example. If you needed to see a doctor, your could walk in, register and within a few hours you’d have seen a doctor and got the prescriptions, services or references you needed and that was it. You would RARELY go to the hospital for an emergency thanks to this.

Over time these CLSC clinics were downsized, and defunded and basically reduced to only services that can be provided by nurses, like taking blood samples and vaccines and a few services for old people. This happened over time thanks to heavy austerity measures from the provincial Liberal party that was in power for about 15 years with a neo-conservative leader and then ending up with an actual doctor as the premier who rigged the system to enable doctors to have their own private clinics and giving all doctors huge pay raises before getting voted out.