MOUNT PEARL, N.L. - One of Newfoundland and Labrador’s longest-running vet clinics is set to shut its doors this week.
Sunrise Animal Hospital, based in Mount Pearl, has told clients it will close on Nov. 13, due to a shortage of qualified veterinarians who could keep services running.
Corporate owner VetStrategy said in a statement that the closure was temporary and the organization was “focused on putting the right resources in place to support a return.”
There’s no timeline for when the clinic may reopen, and the owners will face a highly competitive labour market as they try to lure new vets to the clinic. The industry is facing a nationwide shortage of trained veterinarians, according to the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association (CVMA).
Relying on analysis from Ottawa’s Canadian Occupational Projection System, the CVMA says Canada has faced a shortage of veterinarians since 2021. Updated statistics from the Canadian Occupational Projection System suggest there is a strong risk the shortage will continue until 2035.
“There’s also been a change in how the workforce works,” said Maggie Brown-Bury, a Newfoundland-based veterinarian who is set to become the next president of the CVMA.
“You’re no longer just a general small-animal vet who does everything. You may become an ophthalmologist or a radiologist or a surgeon… so now we need more veterinarians to do what veterinary medicine can do, than we needed 20 years ago.”
Closure evokes ‘an emotional reaction’
Though there are other clinics in the St. John’s area with capacity to take on clients left behind by the Sunrise Animal Hospital’s closure, Brown-Burry says shuttering a long-standing institution is resonating with pet owners.
“I think it’s more of an emotional reaction to a long-standing institution closing its doors,” she said “There’s a lot of pet owners in the St. John’s, Mount Pearl area that have been going there for years. So it’s kind of the end of an era.”
Brown-Burry said more rural and remote areas are struggling even harder — like the Newfoundland town of Marystown, which lost its vet and clinic last fall.
The community’s town council has been working to find a replacement.
“It created a big void since then,” councillor Gary Myles said. “People, nowadays, they take care of their animals, their pets are family. Not like family, they’re family.”
The clinic’s closure means pet owners are forced to drive along a rural highway to the town of Clarenville, about two hours away, for routine or emergency care.
“With an emergency, you could be headed down the highway at 8 o’clock at night,” Myles said.
The obstacles facing foreign vets
While internationally trained veterinarians can help fill the shortage in Canada, long waitlists for licensing exams have seriously slowed the flow of foreign vets into the country.
In a submission to a House of Commons committee in December 2025, Gillian Muir, the Dean of the Western College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, wrote that the university is keeping a waitlist of between eight months to a year for international graduates wanting to write the test.
She recommended the federal government take steps to establish a specialized testing centre at the University of Saskatchewan that could triple the number of tests offered each year.
Brown-Burry says the CVMA is building resources to support new veterinary graduates inside of Canada with the business side of their future practice.
“Like how to communicate with people, how to deal with difficult conversations, how to deal with the conversations around money, because we don’t learn that in veterinary school — but if you go into clinical practice, that is going to be a conversation you end up having to have,” she said.
“There’s only so much we can do with bringing in new, we also have to look at retention.”
