Katherine Fierlbeck

Despite an alarming start, my father’s unexpected and sudden hospital stay was relatively uneventful: the nurses were kind, the food was mediocre and the clinical care was excellent. More disquieting was the pile of soiled laundry that sat on the floor of his room for three days. My mother, who had been a nurse, sniffed that in her day this would have been completely…

There is a myth, perpetuated by both levels of government in Canada, that the Constitution explicitly assigns the responsibility for health care to the provinces. It does not. The Constitution does grant provinces jurisdiction over “hospitals [and] asylums” (excepting marine hospitals) and “generally all matters of a merely local or private nature.” The problem with contemporary health…