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Everyone -Roy Romanow included -agrees that Canada's public health system needs more money -more physicians on salary and more health professionals, not just doctors, paid to diagnose and treat us when we're ill.

And most Canadians are strongly united against private hospitals and private companies under-cutting our health system. However, let's remember that the reasons people get sick are every bit as political as the question of whether the hospitals they go to are publicly or privately run.

At the very top of my wish list for health reform is an overhaul of Health Canada and its drug approval process, which is no longer a public watchdog due to funding cuts and deregulation. The Canadian Women's Health Protection Group has a whole list of reforms that include giving the public-that's us -input into drug approval and health research.

Right up there is the need for legal protection for whistleblowers like Dr. Nancy Olivieri, a specialist in hereditary blood disorders. After discovering that a drug called deferiprone showed promising results treating thalassemia, a blood disorder that causes severe anemia and can be fatal, she signed on with pharmaceutical manufacturer Apotex to head an international research effort that included clinical trials at three sites, including Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, a facility affiliated with the University of Toronto. That was in 1995.

Two years later, Dr.Olivieri's data showed that the drug's initial effectiveness didn't hold for some patients and iron in liver biopsies for some patients was high enough to pose a risk of heart disease and early death. Apotex disagreed with her findings and when Dr.Olivieri took steps to inform her patients of the risks anyway -a no-no under the terms of her contract, the company terminated the deferiprone clinical trials and issued legal warnings to Dr.Olivieri not to discuss her findings. She did anyway, publishing her data in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1998.

The legal threats from Apotex weren't as surprising to Dr.Olivieri as the response she got from her employer. They hung her out to dry. Now, five years later, the hospital and U of T's dirty laundry is exposed in an inquiry on ethics, power and corporate control of medical research called The Report on the Committee of Inquiry Involving Dr.Nancy Olivieri, the Hospital for Sick Children, the University of Toronto and Apotex Inc .

"Neither Hospital for Sick Children, nor the University provided effective support to Dr.Olivieri, or took effective action to defend principles of research ethics, clinical ethics and academic freedom," concluded the report, authored by three medical experts including Patricia Baird, former head of the 1991 Royal Commission on New Reproductive and Genetic Technologies.

The litany of wrongdoings and recommendations are 500 pages long.

Rather than defending her, Sick Kids' executive issued a public statement, "repeating allegations made privately to it by Apotex against the quality of her scientific work." When Macleans' published a story on the controversy in 2000, anonymous callers phoned the magazine to accuse her of unethical or illegal activities including (nod if you've heard this one before) sleeping her way to glory.

Although the inquiry vindicated Dr.Olivieri, the problem of increasing dependence on corporate good will is not unique to the U of T. Ultimately, Health Canada must ensure that no clinical investigator is told to hush up the risks identified in drugs they are investigating -whether they're employed by a university or by Health Canada.

Let's hope Ottawa listens. The future of health lies in preventing disease. According to the Auditor General, the federal government has failed to address the problems posed by federally contaminated sites that could threaten human health. Another federal report points to toxins from plastics and other chlorinated byproducts as the source of carcinogens in our food.

The passing of the Kyoto Protocol is a step in the right direction. However, in order to prevent more disasters, the precautionary principle must be enshrined in health and environmental law and our entire economy must shift towards the principles of sustainable development.

As Judy Darcy, the National President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees said upon the release of the Romanow report, "We have the roadmap. We have the vehicle. The question is, do we have a driver?"