Medicine may be age-old but healthcare is not. As a system of organised service provision, healthcare is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. In spite of (often significant) sub-national differences, broadly speaking there have been two distinct eras in Canada which divide the post-war sociopolitical organisation of public healthcare services: the initial Keynesian welfare state model of de-commodified services and public insurance provision and the current neo-liberal mode of increasingly private, for-profit, commodified health services, which erode the spirit of a collectively oriented public system. Here, the historical bifurcation will be approached from a political economy perspective by linking Colin Leys' description of "market-driven politics' with Colin Hay's theory of depoliticisation.