What does it actually mean for a doctor to be licensed in Canada, and where do I look that up?

A medical licence in Canada is the legal authority to practise medicine in a specific province or territory. It is issued by that jurisdiction's college of physicians and surgeons, or by the Collège des médecins du Québec in Quebec. It does not come from CADDRA, and it does not come from a US medical board. References: https://www.cpso.on.ca/Public/Find-a-Doctor https://www.cpsbc.ca/directory https://www.royalcollege.ca/en/about.html

Different for me. I had already seen the person twice before I thought to look anything up, and I felt silly. I had mixed CADDRA-looking language on the website with the idea of a licence. When I finally used the college tool for where I live, the listing was under a slightly different version of the name. I asked the receptionist which name to search. I still do not enjoy credential decoding. Just my delay, not a claim about how anyone else's doctor should appear.

I spent an evening trying to match the name on my appointment email to a college search after the clinic page listed a pile of letters I did not recognise. I was looking for something that felt like a licence and kept landing on memberships instead. I wrote down the province on the letterhead and searched that college, then brought the screenshot to the desk because I was embarrassed I had waited so long. Nobody at the clinic treated it as a weird question. This is only how I handled my own confusion, not a method I would push on anyone else.