At its best, politics energizes the formation of new public policy as the elected grap- ple with the reconciliation of old and new ways as well as the will of the electorate and the advice of experts. [...] At the core of the HSRC's work, and at the heart of Riding the Third Rail: The Story of Ontario's Health Services Restructuring Commission, 1996-2000, by Duncan Sinclair, the commissions chair, and Mark Rochon and Peggy Leatt, its two CEOs, is the essential and still incomplete task of transforming Canadian health services into a true system of care. [...] Most importantly, perhaps, the HSRC broke the mould of the status quo ante; it used its power to demonstrate conclusively that structural and operational improvements can be made in the delivery of health ser- vices in Canada, even in cautious Ontario, where the iconic status of health care qualifies proposals for change as the political equivalent of the "third rail." This account of the HSRC's w [...] Exhaustion, brought on in part by the fast pace, took the form of growing resistance to change on the part of hospitals, other players and the government; resolve stiffened against even the idea of considering new ways of organizing the provision of health services. [...] To Wbe blunt, the HSRC was created to deal with a set of problems that the government of Ontario and its senior bureaucrats believed they could not solve themselves except at very high political cost, particularly to the premier and the minister of health, the politicians at the point of the plough.