With each passing week, it becomes more obvious that the deterioration in Canada's public health care program is not confined to just the five priority areas now being focused on by governments across the country, nor to the twelve medical specialties examined in the main text of Waiting Your Turn . In particular, there has been increasing anecdotal evidence presented in the media about the long waiting times that psychiatry patients experience. Further, many patients and media representatives have come to the Fraser Institute in search of more complete information on waiting times for these services. Such data is typically not available from local or regional governments for this specialty, and where it is available, it is not comparable across jurisdictions. We responded to this absence in 2003 by adding psychiatry to the annual measurement of waiting lists reported in Waiting Your Turn , thus creating the first national, comprehensive, and comparable measurement of waiting times for mental health services available in Canada.

Information on the performance of the health care system is rare in Canada, and patients with mental health concerns want the same access to information that is available to those with physical ailments in both Waiting Your Turn and through some provinces' health ministries.