This idea is far from new. This was something I worked on back in my days working for Health Canada as part of Task Force Two, the body that initially put forward this idea under Tom Ward, the deputy minister from out east. He championed this idea. This has been around for a long time.
You made two separate points, one about inclusivity and how ACHDHR functions, and the second about the observatory idea.
I'll say that ACHDHR has worked very hard in the last year and a half to completely restructure itself. We used to have a nursing committee and a physician committee, for example. We got rid of that and we now have an interprofessional committee. We used to have a variety of individual groups, but it wasn't representative of all the health care groups, so we changed our membership to allow HEAL, which represents basically every major organization you could think about, to have a full role at the table. We meet with their co-chairs. They represent about 34 groups, but it goes up every day. I can give you the list of members of HEAL, but they're a very inclusive group. They have full members. They send out minutes. We get full reports back, so we've really changed that.
We also open up each of our meetings to outside groups—whether it's the oncologists who came in one time or somebody else—who feel they need to be heard, or have a presentation, or have an idea. They often get time on our agenda very easily, so we're quite inclusive of that. Then all our products are developed with the input of HEAL, which sits at our table, and then they go out for broader consultation. Often we use HEAL, but not just HEAL, to circulate it. We go to the Canadian Medical Forum, for example. Everybody in the Canadian Medical Forum is also part of HEAL, but we'll channel it in multiple ways. Most of our nursing organizations, unions, etc., are all part of HEAL, but we'll go straight to them as well. We try to capture it not just through HEAL, but in different ways. We have the researchers sitting at the table; CIHI is an example.
In terms of the observatory idea, again it's been around for a while. I think it certainly can have merit. There was a brief effort by a group called CPRN to revive it about two and a quarter years ago. I think the large challenge that's been addressed in the past is the jurisdictional and territorial issue and the large and increasing differences among the different jurisdictions, as well as what the interface would be with the large number of players, such as the Health Council of Canada, which was in some ways the answer to the observatory idea when it was created, if you go back in history. Their first two or three reports were predominantly focused on HHR at the time, because that was a bit of their impetus. You have CIHR and CHSR. If you have a lot of groups already at play here, that doesn't mean there can't be a value added from an additional field.
I think one of the things that stakeholders and organizations probably have said, and that I'm very sensitive to and respectful of, is that ultimately we are a table that reports to the deputy ministers of health federal, provincially, territorially. Ultimately we take a lot of our direction from the table, so it is ultimately the federal government and provincial or territorial governments. What I think you're hearing from other groups is that they would like an arm's-length body, with either no or very limited participation of the federal government and the provincial and territorial governments. I've had some email exchanges with Nick Busing and people. The goal is to have something outside of government, and there are pros and cons to that.