Thank you to the witnesses for coming today.
I'm the health care critic for the NDP and usually I'm at the health committee and not at the finance committee. I have to say though that often at the health committee when we raise questions about health care related to finance, they say, “Oh, you should be at the finance committee”, so I'm glad to be here today to ask some of those questions.
I'll start off by saying that I think the debate around health care in Canada is always a very topical issue. It's something that people care about deeply and think about. But it's about more than health care. It's very much about a very cherished Canadian value in that the public health care system we have should be accessible to everybody. It's a foundation of our Canadian society, so I'm very glad that you're here today.
Having listened to the issues you've raised and having read the briefs, I'd say that whether we're talking about the health accords or affordable drug coverage or prescription plans or brain science or dementia or research dollars, I think all of those coalesce around the question of what the federal role is. Again, the federal role is not just to sort of shovel money out the door, and there are certainly problems with doing that, because we do have a lot of independent assessment that says in the long run the provinces will probably be shortchanged by about $36 billion.
It seems to me that the central point is to recognize that the delivery of health care is a provincial matter although there is a role for the federal government. Since the health accords ended in March 2014 and they have not been replaced, what do you see as the federal role? We can talk about individual issues such as dementia or drug coverage, but how will any of that happen unless there is a clear federal responsibility at the table and there is sort of a proactiveness to what goes on?
Maybe, Dr. Klasa, you could begin by letting us know what you foresee needs to be done with regard to a new set of negotiations. The health accords we had previously were far from perfect. In fact, many of the things were never followed through on, so certainly accountability is very important. If you were at the table saying what a new agreement would look like, whether it's for a drug plan or for funding, what would that look like to you with regard to the role for the federal government?