The Context and the Case 'Safe blood' has been a major policy issue in Canada. This is also a sensitive issue, which likely arises from the 'tainted blood tragedy' of the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, the blood supply was organised and managed by the Canadian Red Cross Society (CRCS) as this body had been responsible for blood supply during the Second World War. CRCS is a not-for-profit, humanitarian society, with many diverse activities extending beyond the responsibility for the blood supply which are largely carried out by volunteers. A chronic lack of funding for the CRCS held back technical developments to collect and supply blood in Canada. Government funding only began to increase in the mid-1970s as procedures for blood collection became modernised. But its principles as part of the international Red Cross (non-discrimination against individuals and independence from government) meant its screening and management procedures became fatally flawed in the Canadian context, with often strained relations between volunteer oversight and professional activities. These limitations set the stage for tragedy with the discovery of blood-borne diseases as recruitment of donors was still in volunteer hands and carried out with self-answered questionnaires. The recipe for disaster was set, and the situation was worsened by the failure to track those who had received tainted blood and a failure to apologise or compensate affected individuals on the parts of the provincial and federal governments (see [30, 31] ). As Picard [30] has noted, 'tainted blood' was arguably the largest public health catastrophe in Canada. "About 1,000 individuals who received blood transfusions in Canada between the late 1970s and 1980s were infected with HIV and another 30,000 were infected with hepatitis C" [32] . Eventually, this led to the establishment of a public inquiry in 1993 with the final report of the Krever Commission being delivered in 1997 [31] . Krever recommended the creation of a new blood system and the Commission's recommendations led to the creation of Canadian Blood Services to operate the system in all provinces, except Quebec which formed its own agency, Héma-Québec. With the creation of these agencies, the Canadian blood system joined the U.S. and West European countries in having an expert-based and scientifically-based system and CRCS went on to different humanitarian tasks.