Looking at it from a patient's perspective, they don't have a grasp of the niceties of jurisdictional disputes. They really don't understand how it is that the drugs they get actually get to them. To be perfectly honest, before these last few weeks, I was pretty well completely ignorant as well. I'm not sure I'm any wiser now, because what this whole exercise has highlighted to me is that there isn't a seamless approach to health care. There isn't a seamless approach to the issue of pharmaceuticals.
You could almost argue that pharmaceuticals now are the defining modality of medical management. When I trained, we were on the end of fixing things surgically. Diseases I treated with a knife, as a resident, are now treated medically, for the benefit of the vast majority of patients. Drugs are no longer just one of those things that are there as an optional extra.
I turn it back from the patient's point of view and say that the constitutional debate, the funding debate, the financing debate between health boards, provinces, and the national group has not informed them. It has not made them feel comfortable. It has not made them feel as though things are moving in the right direction. Finger pointing and blame....
You need to learn from case studies, and where you stand on that depends on where you sit, quite frankly.
As Rick Hillier, another Newfoundlander, said, no good crisis should go to waste. The one good thing that could come out of this is that we can do it a hell of a lot better next time and we won't end up in this pickle in the future. If that requires that the feds and the provinces and the territories sit down together and actually talk to each other, is that such a bad thing?