Thank you very much.
Thank you all for coming. You represent some of the most important organizations in our country at this time. This is a direct responsibility of the federal government, and you look after a population that has the worst outcomes in this country.
In trying to close the embarrassing gap in health status of our aboriginal peoples, we need to know what we have to do. To warn you, my question is going to be, if you got to write the recommendations in our report, what sentence would you want in there in order for you to have what you need to be able to do what you're doing?
We also want you to help us determine what would be the leadership role you would play to help us move the country, for non-aboriginal people, away from the medical model and towards the medicine wheel, because we know that your approach in terms of holistic and wellness is actually the way we have to move the whole of our health and health care systems. We want you to be able to have the resources to lead on that as well.
I was heartened two weeks ago, as I explained to the minister, to have been invited to an NWAC conference where they took 100 bright young 17-year-old women from across the country and tried to persuade them to become interested in health careers. I thought that was excellent, but it seems small if we can only do this little bits at a time. When you have only five positions for 80 applicants on various programs, and if people can't afford to go and do it, we have to have a long-range plan.
After the 2004 health accord, in the 2005 budget there was $100 million put into that. We're not quite sure what happened to it. What we're hearing from all of you is the need for stable, predictable funding is there, and the aboriginal health human resources initiative is a reasonable beginning. I'm quite shocked to hear that the community health representatives aren't part of that strategy, and yet in the remote and rural communities that's sometimes all you have. That doesn't seem quite right.