This corner is a big fan of books as a vehicle for bringing ideas and arguments into the public space. Also I like Jane Philpott, thought she was one of the Trudeau government’s best ministers before the unpleasantness of 2019, have admired her work since then. (These days she’s the dean of health sciences at Queen’s University.) Last week she was in Ottawa to launch a book: Health For All: A Doctor’s Prescription for a Healthier Canada.
It’s a quirky book. It opens with an audacious policy proposal, then becomes a kind of memoir. The proposal is that every single person in Canada should have regular access to a local multidisciplinary health-care team. We expect every child to be able to get into a school, she argues. It makes no sense for so many to struggle to find a family physician.
About half of our interview — presented by the Ottawa International Writers Festival — was about this proposal, but it actually takes up quite a bit less than half of Philpott’s book. The rest is about how she thinks about care, why she’s a physician, how she’s dealt with grief and terrible loss, and how she’s often been sustained by her strong religious convictions. Most of these are topics we don’t usually hear addressed by public figures.
