Dr. Jane Philpott’s message on the 40th anniversary of the Canada Health Act

Jane Philpott is an exemplary person in many ways. She is a general practitioner and teacher, a humanitarian, best known for her time in the federal government from 2015-2019, when she was the first physician to be named federal Health Minister. She then went on to be Minister of Indigenous Services, President of the Treasury Board and Minister of Digital Government. She stepped down from government with Jody Wilson-Raybould in 2019 and sat as an independent over the scandal around SNC-Lavallin.  

Dr. Philpott is now the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences and Director of the School of Medicine at Queen’s University in Kingston. She is known for her work on medical education in Africa, HIV/AIDS fundraising, refugee advocacy, and her work on the social determinants of health.

With her friend and colleague Colleen Flood, she discussed the meaning and implications of the criteria of accessibility in the Canada Health Act at a webinar hosted by the Canadian Health Coalition in June. Flood is the Dean of Queen’s University Faculty of Law, and a former Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. That webinar can be watched here –

Philpott is the author of the new book, Health Care for All: A Doctor’s Prescription for a Healthier Canada.

The book is very personal and hopeful, and proposes a radical disruption of the ways in which doctors are trained and the medical system is structured. It is part memoir and part prescription. Philpott quotes Roy Romanow who said, “Medicare unites Canadians,” a sentiment she clearly shares. On page 6, she writes, “After impressive progress in the last half of the twentieth century, Canada’s heath systems did not implement the full vision of the founders of Medicare, which included universal publicly funded pharmacare, home care, long term care, and dental care. Health systems stagnated under the weight of cowardice and short sightedness.”

On the next page, she says, “It drives me mad when I consider that six and half million Canada adults do not have a family doctor or any other access to primary care.”

Health for All was an instant bestseller and lays out a four-part plan of action to put into place a system to address the extreme shortage of primary care doctors: clinical foundation of health for all; a section which explains her evolution as a person and a physician; the social structures need for a healthy society, and finally she broaches how politics affects the pursuit of health for all.

Philpott is at heart a social reformer in the tradition of Elizabeth Blackwell and Emily Stowe. And even Norman Bethune, without the radical politics.

After graduating from medical school, spent a decade, from 1989 to 1998, doing international humanitarian work with her family, in one of the poorest countries in the world, Niger in West Africa. During that time her youngest daughter Emily contracted a meningococcal fever and died at the age of two. The family returned to Canada, and Dr. Philpott took up a post as a family doctor in Markham and Stouffville, north of Toronto.

Dr. Philpott was born in Hespeler, Ontario, now Galt. She is the eldest of four children. Her father was a Presbyterian minister whose focus in faith was on service. It was the untimely death of her brother Gary at the age of six of Reye’s syndrome, and that experience of childhood grief that motivated her to study medicine. Then twenty-five years later, her daughter Emily dies in Galmi, Niger, of meningoccal infection, a day she says was the worst of her life. She says that day set the course for the rest of her life’s work.

“Emily’s death hardened my resolve to commit my life’s work to health for all.”

Jane Philpott in Health for All, page 112

The deaths of these two children, more than a generation apart are the back drop of her life trajectory and of her dedication to medicine.

For me, it was a very daunting assignment to interview Jane Philpott at the Canada Health Act at 40 Research Roundtable at the University of Ottawa. I deeply admire her. She personifies so much of what I hope for all of us. The book is infused with a deeply held desire to make a better and healthier world which I find very touching.

My fireside chat with Dr. Philpott can be watched here –

I recommend the book, and fervently hope Jane Philpott, teacher, doctor, writer, social reformer, parent, humanitarian, physician, politician continues to make an impact on the public health and public life of all of us.