Talk about superb timing. Judging from her preface, Katherine Fierlbeck, a professor of political science at Dalhousie University, has been working on this book off and on for at least 20 years. Yet her big book makes its grand appearance this year, right smack in the middle of a fierce, decade-long political and policy debate. It could not have come at a better time, just as federal transfers to the provinces for health care and the future federal role are being renegotiated. Providing a definitive understanding of the institutions and actors, including the rules of the federal-provincial game in which medicare in particular is played, Fierlbeck cuts like a knife through the confusing and misleading (sometimes purposely so) commentary in the media.
The three-part organization of the book is eclectic yet effective. The chapters in the first part deal with the structure of the system from funding and administration to federal–provincial-territorial relations and the...
Greg Marchildon is Ontario Research Chair in Health Policy and System Design at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He is also the Founding Director of the North American Observatory on Health Systems and Policies.
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