Thank you, Madam Chair.
Honourable members, as the chair has pointed out, my name is Janet Bax, and I'm the executive director of the Federal Healthcare Partnership Secretariat. Accompanying me today is Hillary Flett, who's the manager of the federal health care partnership's office of health human resources.
We are very pleased to be with you today to report on the activities of our office since it was created in 2008. We are going to make most of our presentation in English, but we will be pleased to answer your questions in French.
I will begin the presentation. Ms. Flett will follow and will describe the office's achievements and the challenges we are facing. You have the brief in front of you. We do not intend to go through it page by page. We are simply going to give an overview to allow for as many questions as possible.
First, Madam Chair, I'll offer a brief word on the partnership. We are a horizontal initiative of seven partners, including Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Correctional Service of Canada, Health Canada, National Defence, the Public Health Agency of Canada, Veterans Affairs Canada, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. We represent over one million clients and an annual expenditure on health services and products of over $2.7 billion.
Established in 1994, the partnership has a mandate to work collectively to obtain economies of scale, as Monsieur Tousignant said, while enhancing health care provisions, and to identify areas of health care that would be susceptible to joint collaboration.
In 2006 partners were facing a serious issue with respect to hiring and retaining positions in the Government of Canada and asked the partnership to work collectively on this issue. The result was a study on recruitment and retention of federal positions, which was published in March 2007, three years ago. I believe, Madam Chair, that the committee has seen and read this report.
The commodore has spoken to you about measures that were and are being undertaken by the Canadian Forces. As Commodore Jung points out, however, many of these measures are not available to the public service, particularly with the introduction of the Expenditure Restraint Act. We are still living in a period of economic restraint. We and our partners are realistic about our ability to propose increases in remuneration in present circumstances.
However, our study also demonstrated there is much that could be done to improve the working environment for physicians and health workers. Madam Flett will take you through those initiatives, and then we would be pleased to answer any questions you might have.
I will now hand things over to Madam Flett.