One thing that could be done to address this issue at a broad level is building some demographic factors into the calculation of the Canada health transfer. This is something we discussed with Trevor Tombe in the working paper published by the school of public policy at the University of Calgary, which is available online.
I think this could address some of the challenges that you see in some parts of the country, where the population is aging rapidly. That's a source of added cost. There are different ways you could...it could be an add-on to the CHT to address demographic and socio-economic factors beyond what the CHT already does on a per capita basis. I think that's something we could explore.
Beyond that, I think we also have to imagine what could exist beyond the CHT. The CHT was only created in 2003, but we talk about it like it has always been there. Health funding in Canada has changed a lot since the 1970s. There was a huge change in 1977, and other changes later in 1995 and so forth.
Moving forward, we have to think about whether the CHT is the only tool available, or whether we can think about tax points, which I alluded to earlier. There is also the possibility of having revenue sharing in terms of having a federal tax that will be redistributed directly to the provinces, like is done with the GST in Australia.
These are things that we explore in our paper. I very much hope that you can look at it and provide feedback to us, because the ideas are there.
We need people to talk about this and not just get stuck on the CHT and how much it should increase every year and so forth, because there's much more to help our funding than just that.