‘Fragmenting care’: How a pilot project in N.B. pharmacies fell apart – CBC
Documents show program to ease pressure on hospitals was troubled from the start
Oct 01, 2025
Blaine Higgs had a problem. Canada’s largest pharmacy chain had a solution.
In the summer of 2022, Higgs, New Brunswick’s Progressive Conservative premier, made sweeping changes to the senior management of the province’s health care system, vowing to find new ways to improve access.
By the end of the year, Perry Martin, a senior lobbyist for Shoppers Drug Mart, was nudging the provincial Department of Health to move quickly on a pilot program the company said would help.
When a Health Department official didn’t provide Martin a clear timeline, he forwarded the email to Higgs’s chief of staff, Louis Leger.
“Doesn’t look like we can hit the Premier’s timelines for an announcement at this point,” Martin, the vice-president of government relations for Loblaws, the owner of Shoppers, wrote in a Dec. 14, 2022, email obtained by CBC News.
Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/new-brunswick-pharmacy-pilot-project-1.7646726
