Let's take as an example Justice Krever. He insists that, as the first principle, blood be a "public resource." That is, the government, not you, owns your blood as soon as it's left your body. He does not even discuss alternatives to state control of the supply and use of blood products. To even further insulate the blood system from the discipline of the market and direct accountability to individuals, he suggests a limited-compensation no-fault insurance scheme that would protect negligent government officials.

Justice Krever reflects the orthodoxy launched by Justice Hall, consolidated in the 1984 Canada Health Act by lawyer Monique Begin, and now set to expand into drugs and home care by lawyer Allan Rock, Minister of Health. The mantra is simple. Health care is "too important" to be left to the market of doctors, patients, and hospital providers. Doctors will charge too much. Poor patients can't afford them. Public hospitals will be under-funded unless the government can deny the middle class access to private care, and force its citizens to pay the high taxes necessary to sustain a public system. In short, Canada's current health care system reflects a no-exceptions, no-compromise suspicion of market behaviour.

How do otherwise intelligent people develop such a pessimistic and narrow view of one of mankind's most basic activities, exchanging one good or service for another?

Attitudes towards the market are like attitudes towards anything—a learned response. What we think depends a lot more on what we experience than what we read. No surprise, then, that our judges seem obsessed with market failure. Judges spend year after year sorting out new disputes according to rules derived from old disputes. Tales of broken promises, theft, deception, fraud, abuse, and bankruptcy—that's the working day of an average judge. Small wonder they wear black robes. Now if all you do all day is see how two parties have failed to make the market work, you might be tempted to think it's not the individuals who are to blame, but rather the market itself.

What happens when you combine judges conditioned to see the market as a source of failure, and a political class anxious to prove they can provide goods and services better than the market? Public monopoly medicine delivered with all the gravitas of our judiciary.

Public monopoly health care, of course, has its defenders who thank the heavens for the medical moonlighting of Canada's judges. The public, faced with lengthening waiting lists, restricted access to new medical technology, and fearful of new taxes, is starting to have its doubts. A recent COMPASS poll found that 67 percent of respondents agreed either a lot or somewhat that there should be more medical services provided by private suppliers alongside the public health system.

Just as telling, Justice Hall's own son is a surgeon in the United States. Perhaps he and the other Canadian doctors practising south of the border should come home to lead the next Royal Commission if not on health care, then judicial reform.