Reading the TRC as a Health Studies Student: Jordan’s Principle and the Work That Remains

Jordan River Anderson was a boy from Norway House Cree Nation, born in 1999 with complex medical needs. He spent more than two years in hospital — not because he needed to be there, but because the federal and provincial governments could not agree on who would pay for his home care. He died in hospital at age five, never having lived in a family home. Jordan’s Principle, adopted by the House of Commons in 2007, says a First Nations child should get the services they need first, and governments can argue about the bill after.

I first read that story in a lecture, and what unsettled me most was how bureaucratically ordinary it was. Nobody in it intended harm. A child died in a gap between funding formulas.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action include seven directed specifically at health (numbers 18 through 24). They ask governments to acknowledge that the current state of Indigenous health is a direct result of policy, to measure and close the gaps, to fund healing centres, and to require cultural competency and anti-racism training for health-care workers. Reading them as a Health Studies student is uncomfortable in a productive way: they’re addressed to systems, but systems are staffed by people, and I intend to be one of those people.

I want to be careful here. I’m a settler student from Brampton; this isn’t my story to interpret, and reading reports isn’t the same as doing the work. What I can do at this stage is get the history right, notice how “jurisdictional dispute” can be a euphemism for a child waiting, and pay attention to Indigenous-led work — from First Nations–governed health authorities to the compliance orders that human rights tribunals have had to issue, repeatedly, to make Jordan’s Principle real in practice.

The TRC treats health as inseparable from reconciliation. I used to read that as a metaphor. I now think it’s literal: the health gap is where broken promises become measurable. For anyone planning a life in Canadian health care, the Calls to Action aren’t background reading. They’re a job description waiting for people willing to take it seriously.