That's interesting. My father was on the FCM some twenty years ago, as the mayor of Dartmouth, and he'd be delighted to hear that.
I want to talk to Dr. Smadu, if I could.
We've had a lot of briefs in our travels, but the one you submitted is, in my view, brilliant, in part because it's well written and hits important topics, but also because it gets to something that's very important to me.
When I got elected, I joined the health committee to try to talk about the social determinants of health, the risk factors, chronic disease, populations at risk through literacy, education, housing, and all these sorts of things. You've done a very good job on putting those in play. When we talk about health, so often we're really talking about illness and intervention as opposed to talking about health, and I think you've talked about health.
You mentioned that the Public Health Agency of Canada groups disparities into four main areas: income, aboriginal status, geographic location, and gender. In my view, persons with disabilities would be a fifth group. I know they're all interlinked by income, but I would suggest that persons with disabilities would be in there as well.
How do we focus the discussion in the country on health? I think more and more people are talking about how we keep Canada healthy. You've put forward a specific notion of $10 million to establish an action-oriented, pan-Canadian program. There is a population health institute as part of the Public Health Agency of Canada that's being set up, and it would seem to me that it might be a place to do some of that work.
We've had people come before our committee recently talking about the tax credit on physical fitness, which I think is a good thing, but it's a small piece. In fact, we heard Mr. Knight talk about recreation facilities and keeping our children active and strong. In my community, we have some very good health clubs, but the best investment the government has made was to build a good walking trail around the lakes, for example. That actually gets people out and walking, and it doesn't require a membership card or doesn't cost $39, $49, or $69 a month.
Overall, though, I don't think we've done a good job of putting money and resources into the health of Canadians. We're still very much focused on interventions, hospitals, and those sorts of things.
So my question after that lengthy preamble is how we do that. Are we going to get there as a nation? Some other countries are doing it much better than we are. We do know the social determinants of health cause the risk factors, cause chronic disease, cost us lots and lots of money, and cost us interventions. Where are we in actually getting Canada as a nation to accept that reality?