Introduction <p>Meeting the health care needs of society has been a key purpose of Canadian medical education for three decades, with significant scholarship focused on educating physicians-in-training for the provision of more equitable health care delivery. The success of these efforts is contingent upon first understanding the assumptions and priorities of the training system itself.</p> Methods <p>This work applies Foucauldian genealogy and critical discourse analysis to an archive of over 120 policy statements, education frameworks, strategic plans, and guiding documents to explore historically how medical professionalism, health advocacy, and social accountability shape contemporary physicians-in-training with respect to meeting the health care needs of Canadian society.</p> Results <p>Current policies and practices preferentially produce <i>medical experts</i> primarily focused on providing high-quality individual clinical care. This subject position entails from the ways in which these texts construct “contemporary society’s expectations”, de-emphasize training for systems-level advocacy, conceptualize social accountability as integral to—but not independent of—medical education institutions, and recurrently speak <i>for</i> and <i>about</i> the public that the profession serves. While this individual-focused skill set is necessary, it is insufficient to equip physicians to work for the equitable distribution of health care on societal levels.</p> Conclusion <p>Historical analysis suggests that Canadian medical education has not effectively enacted its espoused purpose of meeting societal needs. For its institutions to strengthen their partnership with the public, they must commit to a more expansive understanding of health care, take up deliberative models that centre public engagement in the design and delivery of their activities, re-configure and clarify the social contract, and adopt strategies of social responsiveness.</p>