The concepts of Canada's so-called comprehensive universities and medical and doctoral universities were mainly proposed by the famous Canadian magazine "Maclean's" (Maclean's is also translated as "Maclean's Magazine"). Maclean's Magazine classifies Canadian universities into three categories based on school majors: Medical & Doctoral, Comprehensive, and Primarily undergraduate. Therefore, whenever we talk about medical doctoral universities and comprehensive universities, we are referring to the classifications defined by Maclean's magazine.

Here medical doctoral universities refer to large research universities that can provide doctoral degrees in most disciplines (including medicine). The medical doctorate degree is only offered by universities that require higher comprehensive strength, so "medical doctorate universities" are the universities with the top research strength in Canada. However, the classification of so-called medical and doctoral universities is also very controversial in Canada. It seems that schools are classified into third, sixth or ninth grades based on school disciplines and majors, which is not necessarily objective. For example, McGill University has a very strong medical school, ranking first in Canada in the medical doctor category. Emerging universities such as the University of York and the University of Waterloo, which were established in the 1950s and 1960s, although they also have strong scientific research capabilities, are excluded from the medical doctorate category because they do not have medical majors.

Comprehensive universities refer to those universities that offer some professional master’s and doctoral degrees. Comprehensive universities generally have a younger history than medical and doctoral universities, especially the post-undergraduate disciplines are not comprehensive. However, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, some comprehensive universities are not weaker than medical and doctoral programs. For example, the University of Waterloo, Memorial University of Newfoundland, University of York, etc. have surpassed some medical and doctoral universities to many extents.

Basic universities refer to those universities that focus on undergraduate education. There are very few graduate and doctoral programs. The teaching quality of this type of university is by no means the lowest among the three types of universities, but it is a small class education of the same level. Canadian universities are all public universities, funded by the ministries of education of each province to ensure uniform teaching quality. Therefore, many people in China who do not understand basic universities will misunderstand this type of university and believe that the undergraduate teaching quality of basic universities is not as good as that of medical and doctoral universities. However, the actual situation is to a large extent the opposite.

In addition, Canada's "Globe and Mail" classifies Canadian universities according to the number of students and school size: large universities (more than 22,000 full-time students), medium-sized universities (12,000-22,000 students), small universities ( 4,000-12,000 students) and micro-universities (less than 4,000 students). According to the classification of "The Globe and Mail", Queen's University, which is called a medical and doctoral university in "Maclean's", is classified as a medium-sized university, while the University of Waterloo, a comprehensive university, is classified as a large university. This is for comparison only.