We're doing preliminary work. In the last year we commissioned a considerable study with the Canadian Ophthalmological Society on the costs of blindness, and it replicated some methodology that was used in the United States and Australia, where there were much better data about the costs of vision loss. Using that methodology, we found that the cost to Canada for blindness is about $15 billion every year. About $8 billion of that is direct medical costs, and another $6 billion to $7 billion is the personal and human cost of persons with vision loss. That's obviously quite a big number.
What Canada lacks is a coordinated, integrated approach to vision health. There's no real activity going on other than what CNIB is doing with some volunteer doctors and what not. There are no real activities to put the ophthalmologists together with the optometrists, with rehab centres, with employment strategies, and integrate those with provincial strategies and the federal government.
It's not really a new idea. The Canadian government actually showed a lot of leadership in 2006, with the World Health Organization, in endorsing just such a plan, but it really has not gone anywhere since then. So we are going to start talking to governments a little more actively in the next few years about provincial and federal roles in bringing all these groups together to talk about how health care integrates with employment, integrates with rehabilitation, and start lowering the cost of blindness in Canada.