Category: Blog

Canadians woke up Tuesday morning to a new reality – a majority Liberal Government. History has been made with the Liberals jumping from a distant third at the start of the campaign to now lead the country with an indisputably strong majority.

The past weekend saw families gather for Thanksgiving dinner, or to watch fall football and baseball games – and inevitably talk about the election. Shared views of family and friends have played a role in past elections—particularly assisting undecided voters to make up their minds and we expect that this will be no different this time around.

While poll after poll shows that Canadians put health at the top of their priority list, they haven’t made political leadership on health an electoral imperative at the federal level.

Among the most revolutionary changes to how health care services are delivered to patients is personalized medicine, where diagnostic testing provides genetic, molecular and cellular information that guides medical decisions tailored to the individual patient. Knowing your genetic make-up helps determine which medications are likely to be most effective, and that can save patients and the health system considerable time and trouble.

The campaign has just past the mid-point, but despite ads, photo ops, policy announcements and candidates knocking on doors, national polls still have the race in a three-way statistical tie.

In a recent blog post, I discussed the concern of many in the health community that health has not emerged as a major campaign issue in Election 2015 and set out to explain why this is the case. Noting that health has not been a policy or political priority for years in Ottawa, I suggested that it is not surprising that health hasn’t emerged as a top issue on the campaign trail.