Canadian Enterprise

The challenge health system officials, including health care Commissioners, have in serving to meet the requirements of their political masters is "tempering" the influences of free enterprise. Having to manage the public / private interface in this way is not a new phenomenon for government officials. In her book The Cult of Efficiency Janice Stein discusses role of the State as the provider of private goods and she cites the following quote by Adam Smith:

"The man of the system... is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan for government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it... He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand that arranges the different pieces upon the chess-board which have no other principles of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it."

How will market forces play out against the vision of a retired Saskatchewan politician? Transcending this kind of a mindset necessitates discipline that is akin to navigating a minefield.