Pathogen on the Prairie

As a practising physician, Ryan Meili has served his time in the deep trenches of poverty, social deprivation, and addiction. As the head of the Saskatchewan New Democratic Party from 2018 to 2022, he also served as leader of the opposition during the first two years of the COVID‑19 pandemic.

Soon after he was first elected to the provincial legislature in 2017, Meili issued an updated edition of his 2012 book, A Healthy Society: How a Focus on Health Can Revive Canadian Democracy, in which he laid out his vision for a more progressive society and a new politics. He argued that such perennial concerns as housing, education, food security, employment, and the environment needed to be addressed as social determinants of health — and resolved together by “prescribing money.”

Too often, social policy is reactive: we try to rescue people who are drowning downstream without venturing upstream to see why they’re falling in. Because “physicians...