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.
Instead, we're seeing some provinces doing more than others. As part of my job, I read a lot of things online about health care, news stories and stuff, but now what happens to me is that I get lots of ads on health care—my phone thinks I'm a nurse half the time—ads like, “Do you want to work in Atlantic Canada? Here is your incentive to move.” We're poaching from each other rather than looking at the system across the country.
The newest one I've seen is actually for anesthesiologists—that's my parents' wish, but that's not my employment. Provinces are desperately looking for folks to keep their operating rooms open. If we're simply moving people from Alberta to B.C. or from Saskatchewan back over to Nova Scotia, where people might have grown up, that's not solving the bigger issue. It's costing us more because we're putting in all these expenses. We heard from the rural municipalities in the last panel that doctors are such a big thing, and we're seeing rural municipalities pony up all sorts of money in trying to recruit a doctor to their towns—an incentive or whatever it might be. They're just competing with each other for the same doctor and spending more money to do it, rather than our having a national strategy. I think it's crucial if we're going to solve the problem we're in.