This Critical Issues Bulletin is the Institute's twelfth attempt to document the extent to which queues for visits to specialists and for diagnostic and surgical procedures are being used to control health care expenses. When we began producing waiting-list measures in 1988, there was anecdotal evidence that hospital waiting times were becoming significant. However, there were no systematic measurements of the extent of waiting.

Canada's dairy policy is a very complex web of interrelated policies, programs, and people nested in a number of private and public institutions. It is a system whose creation, expansion, and vigorous defence has been motivated almost entirely by milk producers, i.e., dairy farmers. If they wanted to end the elaborate supply management marketing scheme, open up the border to imports, or renounce the cash subsidies from governments, these changes would be made very quickly by governments.

Within the United States, the image of the medically uninsured being denied important medical treatment stirs the emotions of the American public, while the issue of how to address this problem has bedevilled American politicians throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. The spectre of the medically uninsured in America haunts Canada as well.