Canadian Health Network

» see canadian-health-network.ca as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The Canadian Health Network was a federal health information service, run by the Public Health Agency of Canada from 1999, in both official languages. It was not one newsroom. Twenty-six affiliated organizations, universities and national nonprofits among them, produced and vetted what went onto it, which made it less a website than a shared editorial standard with an address attached.

What it sold was nothing, and that was the product. Around five million hits a year landed on it, and about 40 percent of those came from health professionals rather than worried patients, which is the strongest thing anybody can say about a consumer health site. Nurses and librarians pointed people at it because it was the one address in Canadian health search that was not trying to move a supplement or book a clinic appointment.

In November 2007 the Public Health Agency announced the service would end. The reason was arithmetic. The agency had been ordered to find 16.7 million dollars in cuts to its grants and contributions, and the roughly seven million a year going to the Canadian Health Network was the largest single item that could be lifted out without touching a program with a constituency behind it. Funding stopped on 31 March 2008. The next morning the address served a notice pointing somewhere else.

A state-funded health reference in your own language, kept honest by two dozen institutions and selling nothing, is not something I had access to in the years this was alive. Looking up a symptom in Turkish in the 2000s got you a forum thread or a page with something to sell. That pattern is not particular to Turkey, it is what health search looks like anywhere the public option was never built or was taken away. Canada built the thing, ran it for nine years and then found seven million dollars inside it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what 26 affiliates bought ~

The affiliate structure is the part worth copying. Rather than staff a national newsroom, the agency contracted topic areas out to organizations that already held the expertise, and each affiliate was responsible for its own section. The network's job was to hold the standard and the interface steady across all of them, in two languages, which is a much smaller job than writing the material.

This is cheap next to the alternative and it produces something no commercial health site can produce, which is an answer a specialist organization is willing to put its own name against. It also creates a dependency that only shows itself on one day. When the funding stops, 26 organizations lose their distribution at once, and not one of them owns the address.

~ the seven million ~

Seven million dollars a year against a federal health budget is a rounding error, and that is precisely why it was picked. Grant lines with no employees attached, and no constituency that will hold a press conference, are the easiest place to find a number. An information service is the purest example of the type. Nobody's clinic closes. Nobody's treatment stops.

The criticism at the time was public and specific. Carol Goar wrote about it in the Toronto Star that November, and the Globe and Mail ran an editorial against pulling the plug, arguing that credible and comprehensible health information is exactly what the open web does not supply on its own. The decision held anyway. Editorials are not a constituency either.

~ both official languages ~

Everything on it existed twice. A bilingual obligation is not a translation budget bolted onto the end, it is a constraint on every editorial decision, because the French page and the English page have to say the same thing to two readerships that do not read the same sources or arrive with the same assumptions. It roughly doubles the cost of the part that is already expensive.

No commercial health site would ever carry that. The economics of advertising-funded health content push toward whichever language pool is larger and cheaper to serve, and the smaller one gets a machine translation or nothing at all. Doing it properly is the sort of thing only a public obligation produces, which is a decent summary of what was being paid for here and what was actually cancelled.

~ what replaced it ~

Traffic was pushed over to Healthy Canadians, a government portal that already existed and had been built for a different job. The complaint about it was consistent: promotional in tone, thin on the subjects people are most reluctant to raise with a human being, and organized around what the department wanted to announce rather than what a person had arrived to find out.

That difference is structural rather than a failure of the writers. An affiliate network answers to 26 organizations whose credibility is sitting on the page. A departmental portal answers to a department. Both are public, only one of them was ever a reference work, and that one took nine years to build and a single budget cycle to remove.

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