A New Perspective on Health Policy for Social Democrats

in What's Left?: The New Democratic Party in Renewal, eds. Z. D. Berlin & H. Aster (Stoddart, 2001).

The Canadian medicare system has been an important part of Canadian federalism for more than thirty years. For a long time Canadians were among the most satisfied people in the world with how they received health care. By the late 1980s, this began to change. Health care inflation and fears about the sustainability of current health care systems resulted in a process of retrenchment and restructuring. By 1992, growing public concern and dissatisfaction that led Michael Decter to observe that Canadians were no longer smug about medicare.