A Manhattan Project for Canadian Healthcare?

Canada's healthcare system faces mounting crises, from dementia to homecare shortages, yet responses remain mired in stakeholder consultation. Some experts now call for a "Manhattan Project" approach. However, the Manhattan Project's centralized wartime model is incompatible with Canada's federated healthcare system. A better template is DARPA - the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - which enables rapid, parallel experimentation across distributed jurisdictions. A Canadian healthcare DARPA would require leadership willing to abandon consensus, protection for failure, compressed timelines and, crucially, reallocation of existing resources rather than new bureaucracy. This model replaces inertia with iteration, creating mechanisms that learn faster than disease spreads.