Operation Smile Canada is part of the largest volunteer-based medical charity providing free cleft surgery for children. With help from our donors, volunteers and corporate partners, we transform lives with surgeries that can take as little as 45 minutes and cost as little as $240.

Operation Smile began in the United States in 1982, and since then we have grown to become a global network of foundations and have together provided hundreds of thousands of free surgeries for children and young adults born with facial differences.

Why Cleft Surgery?

Every three minutes a child is born with a cleft lip or cleft palate. These children are often unable to eat, speak, or even smile. In many places, they're shunned and rejected, sometimes abandoned by their own parents.

Too many don't even survive. One in five children born with a cleft condition in Latin America and the Caribbean will die. As many as 93% of children born with an unrepaired cleft will die before their 20th birthday! These statistics are staggering and unacceptable! Operation Smile believes that every child born with a cleft lip or cleft palate deserves a chance at life.

Operation Smile Canada

We know Canadians like you believe every child deserves a chance at life. So in 2011, we founded Operation Smile Canada. Since then, caring and generous supporters helped provide thousands of surgeries for children around the world living in countries where little ones with clefts have suffered for too long.

Operation Smile Canada mobilizes a world of generous hearts to heal children's smiles and transform lives.

We believe all children deserve to live with dignity. And for those suffering from cleft lip, cleft palate or other facial differences, dignity begins with a smile.

With our global partners, we work in over 60 countries, benefiting from the skilled expertise of thousands of medical volunteers, delivering safe, effective cleft surgery and related medical care directly to children. Many of these children have never seen a doctor before. Most simply can’t afford the care they need.