OTTAWA — Dr. Eric Hoskins has always thought of pharmacare as a nation-building project.

Six years before Prime Minister Mark Carney catapulted the words “nation-building” to the top of his political agenda, Hoskins used the same language when he issued a landmark report calling for Canada to implement universal, publicly funded drug coverage.

“In Canada, we know that great national projects can go well beyond building things that we can see with our eyes,” Hoskins wrote in 2019, after concluding the work of a Justin Trudeau-era council assessing the merits of such a program.

“We, too, can be the kind of generation that builds a national project that changes Canada for the better.”

Eric Hoskins stands with Ginette Petitpas Taylor, then federal minister of health, after the tabling of

See Full Page