It was probably about the 10th time that a patient or doctor in Canada used the word “fair” that I started to realize how important the value was to Canadians.

Mr. Sanders was making what his staff called a “cross-border learning tour,” though it was clear from the start that he already knew quite a lot about the Canadian system, and had found much to like about it.

He is pushing hard for the Democratic Party in the United States to embrace the notion of a single-payer health care system like Canada’s. His legislative proposal shares many Canadian particulars — government-financed insurance, no direct payment at the point of care, private doctors and hospitals, global budgets.

But Mr. Sanders also clearly admires and envies the values that lie beneath the Canadian system — a commitment to equity and a right to health care that is less commonly heard when Americans talk about what they want from their system. In many ways, he was in Canada to learn about how to achieve that change of heart.

At a public event, he was asked how to make this change by Dr. Danielle Martin, a physician, hospital executive and advocate. “The journey is not easy,” Mr. Sanders said. “The journey never has been easy for human rights and human dignity.”

Afterward, I asked Dr. Martin whether she thought the sentiment or the policy had come first in Canada. Did Canadians embrace a government health care system because they believed in equity? Or did they come to value equity because they’d been exposed to a health care system that promoted it? Some of both, she said, but “the system itself creates a language.”

“We’re not genetically different people here on the other side of the border,” she said. “There is no reason why we would have different values, except there was a movement here.”