The new Minister of National Health and Welfare, Judy LaMarsh,
was a Niagara Falls lawyer who knew from personal and
professional experience about the high costs of health care. She
was pleased to discover that her senior staff had been analyzing
possible approaches to medicare while waiting for the Royal
Commission’s report. In July 1964, LaMarsh and her provincial
colleagues began the initial discussions of the commission’s
recommendations and almost immediately identified lack of
personnel and lack of training facilities as key problems in the
adoption of a national medicare plan. However, since the
Department of Finance was in the process of undertaking a major
overhaul of the taxation system, the addition of an expensive
new shared-cost program would have to wait until the new
transfer and equalization system was in operation. But medicare
had become a political issue, and Prime Minister Pearson held a
federal–provincial conference in July 1965 to spell out his
government’s proposals to the provincial le