In 1997, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies made its dramatic appearance and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. It was a blockbuster history book, and bookstores continue to stock large quantities. But it was not written by a historian.
Trained as an evolutionary…
Gregory P. Marchildon
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.
Articles by
Gregory P. Marchildon
When I agreed to become the executive director of the Royal Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada, in 2001, I thought I knew what I was getting into. After all, I had dealt with difficult and high-profile policy issues as a provincial deputy minister and cabinet secretary in Saskatchewan. I was wrong — so…
I have only known Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia-related conditions at one remove. The extended members of my family with dementia always lived so far away that I could only see their decline from a distance, if at all. This distance extended to my understanding of the condition and its consequences because, in my mind, even knowing about this terrifying disease might be bad…
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…
In an editorial that appeared in The Globe and Mail in January 2011, André Picard, Canada’s most insightful health journalist, decried the growing tendency to blame and shame individuals for being overweight. In his view, the graphic images of big butts and jiggly bellies that invariably accompany television news items and documentaries make his…
What’s Race Got to Do with It?
A startling new analysis of the difference between Canadian and U.S. healthcare funding April 2009
The word “race” divides us—primarily according to skin colour and secondarily according to ethnicity. While the concept of race lacks a biological basis, categorization by race continues to shape relations within societies, particularly in those countries where slavery was a central institution for centuries or where settlement involved the displacement of large numbers of indigenous…
Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief
New Brunwick’s great patron comes in for some dark re-evaluation October 2008
The Beaverbrook Art Gallery is an oddity—a major cultural attraction in one of Canada’s regional cities. For Fredericton, New Brunswick, the gallery is the jewel in the crown of Lord Beaverbrook’s munificence to that small city that included a library, a theatre and a hockey arena among many other donations. Adorning the gallery’s walls are paintings by…