This gripping account of the COVID-19 experience in Saskatchewan goes beyond pandemic memoir to draw lessons we can use to create a healthier future.

Filled with moving stories of how COVID changed people’s lives, Ryan Meili’s deeply humane account of the pandemic draws on his unique experience as a doctor and as the leader of Saskatchewan’s official opposition during the first two years of the outbreak. A Healthy Future reveals how the pandemic exposed and made worse problems in health care, elder care, education, and social supports – and details how we can do better.

Written with passion and commitment, this book offers a firsthand look at how the pandemic laid bare the shortcomings of Saskatchewan’s – and Canada’s – public health response, with tragic results. It also provides an inspiring vision of what Canadians can learn from the pandemic to create a healthier and more equitable future.

Ryan Meili is a family doctor at the West Side Community Clinic in Saskatoon. He also works for the College of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan as head of the Division of Social Accountability, where he’s responsible for helping ensure that Saskatchewan’s future doctors are equipped to meet the health needs of the diverse communities they will serve. Ryan is vice-chair of the national advocacy organization, Canadian Doctors for Medicare. From its inception, Ryan has been involved in SWITCH, the Student Wellness Initiative Toward Community Health, a student-run, interdisciplinary, inner-city clinic whose mandate is to bring students from nursing, medicine, social work, physiotherapy, pharmacy, nutrition, and numerous other disciplines together to serve the residents of Saskatoon’s core communities. Ryan also runs the College of Medicine’s Making the Links program, which gives medical students the opportunity to work in Northern Saskatchewan (Île à-la-Crosse, Pinehouse, and Buffalo River Dene Nation), at SWITCH, and in the rural communities of Mozambique in southeast Africa. One of the program’s goals is for students to gain firsthand knowledge of the social factors influencing health by living among and working with diverse peoples. Ryan lives in Saskatoon with his wife, Mahli, who is training to be a pediatrician, and their son, Abraham.

Ryan Meili's profile page

• Short-listed, Non-Fiction Award, Saskatchewan Book Awards

“When the pandemic arrived, Dr. Ryan Meili was both a physician and the leader of the NDP opposition in Saskatchewan. He was in a unique position to take part in both the medical and the political responses to COVID-19, and he kept meticulous notes. He transformed them into an insightful journal of Saskatchewan’s plague years in A Healthy Future: Lessons from the Frontlines of a Crisis, his new book published this fall.”

The Tyee

"[Meili] has done us a service in meticulously chronicling a ghastly period."

Literary Review of Canada