College of Arts historian Dr. Catherine Carstairs provided her thoughts on the first stage of the federal government’s dental care plan to The Canadian Press. 

The benefits program should be improved to better meet people’s needs, especially since “there’s really quite a blending” of cosmetic and medical procedures in dentistry, said Carstairs in the article that appeared in nearly 100 online publications, including CTVNews.ca. 

Carstairs is a professor in the Department of History where she studies the history of health and medicine. She is the author of The Smile Gap: A History of Oral Health and Social Inequality.