Abstract

I can't remember a time when public expectations ramped to the heights they reached during the countdown to Commissioner Roy Romanow's presentation late last fall of the report of the Royal Commission on the Future of Healthcare in Canada (Building on Values: The Future of Health Care in Canada, November 2002). Its release followed closely on publication in October 2002 of Volume Six: Recommendations for Reform, the culmination of an equally comprehensive two-year study of healthcare by the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, chaired by Senator Michael Kirby. The Canadian public came to expect in these two reports answers to their every question and neat solutions to healthcare's widely publicized problems. Now we are well into the New Year and everybody is waiting for somebody to do something!