Thank you, Chair, and I would like to thank all of the people who presented today for their presentations.
I would like to start with my friend, Elinor Wilson. Elinor has been a champion of public health and I guess what's part of public health, population health.
I'd like to talk a little about how we go about having an impact on population health. The Public Health Agency of Canada has done I think a very good job and in some ways came about as a reaction to SARS and those kinds of issues. Part of its mandate is in fact to have an impact on chronic disease, which in the part of the world I come from, Atlantic Canada, is particularly prevalent. Diabetes is out of control. There are high incidences of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and arthritis.
In terms of the social determinants of health, I wonder whether Canada has really addressed the social determinants of health from a population health point of view. Where are we on the scale of actually getting out in front of chronic disease?