Thank you very much.
To start, I'll direct my question to Ms. MacEwen, who I think hasn't had an opportunity to answer many questions. If there's time remaining and folks from the Canadian Health Coalition want to jump in, I would invite them to do that.
I want to return directly to the question of privatization, first of all. I think Mr. Staples just touched on this. We're seeing right now a huge spike in the extent to which nursing agencies are used to fill vacancies in the public system. These are people who are available to work. They work in that industry. Canadians are actually paying outrageous premiums in order to hire these nurses right now from private nursing agencies that are making a profit on that expenditure to have them come and work in public institutions.
Clearly, there is a question about appropriate spending. One of the places we might hope to see some remedy for that, in the case of provincial governments that are bound and determined to carry on this expensive and broken course, is at a table that the federal government has the power to convene with its spending power for provinces to talk about best practices, including when it comes to privatization and the inordinate amount of spending that's going on through private nursing agencies right now.
Perhaps you can speak, first of all, to how Canadians benefit when governments pay for private nurses over public nurses, if they do at all—it seems to me perhaps not. How can the convening power of the federal government be used in order to establish some fairer criteria that are co-determined with the provinces that would govern the way new health spending is done in Canada?