Finance committee  There's such a need for national leadership on health care staffing, both because not every province is doing it—Alberta doesn't really have a workforce plan currently for health care—and, also, you're right that we're in this race-to-the-bottom mentality, whereas we really should be having a strategy that looks at retention, at how we keep the skilled health professionals that we have working in the systems where they're working, and that also looks at recruitment, the training, the immigration, whatever those other pieces might be, to ensure we have the workforce we need going forward.

Finance committee  That is something we called for at the time, along with groups across the country. We needed to do a new national health accord where everyone was on the same page, because it should be one medical system, one health care system—medicare—no matter which province you live in. We shouldn't be having one-off deals with every province, with different levels of service and coverage.

Finance committee  Absolutely. That's something that comes up all the time. There's kind of this idea that, if we just try to find a way to fill the gaps for that one-third or so of Canadians who might not have coverage, that will be cheaper and it will somehow work out, but we lose all of the savings of a single-payer system if we just add new programs.

Finance committee  It's something that folks in Alberta know well. We saw that through the pandemic across the country, with people losing their benefits. We have the boom-and-bust cycle of oil and gas here, where people have employment and then they don't. That's happened many times in my lifetime and in Alberta's history.

Finance committee  Absolutely. That's why tying strings to funding is important. We're seeing that with housing funding right now in municipalities. If you want the funding, there are rules you have to implement and standards that you need. There's no reason we can't do the same in long-term care with provincial governments.

Finance committee  Yes, we don't see very stringent strings or really anything that will be enforceable with respect to that funding. We're glad negotiations are happening, but when it came to things like child care, the federal government caved to Alberta on every demand they had, watering down the deal.

Finance committee  That's fine. Thank you.

Finance committee  Thank you, Chair and committee members, for having me today. My name is Chris Gallaway. I am the executive director at Friends of Medicare. We are based here in Alberta. We're a non-partisan advocacy organization and we've been around since 1979 working to improve, protect and strengthen public health care for Albertans and all Canadians.