Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, guests, for being here this morning.
I want to ask you about a very important area for provincial governments. I'm glad that you're here because we've had representatives from other governments in other parts of the world. We've had municipal governments. But I think there's a real opportunity for Canada to have...and you talked about the open data working group among the provinces in the area of health care, because that consumes typically half of provincial budgets, and it seems to be growing.
I think there are things that we could do with open data, and perhaps the federal government—which doesn't really run any health care facilities, but plays a role in health care when it comes to certain areas where there's a synergy among the provinces, for example, research and drug approvals and so on—could play a role in establishing certain standards when it comes to data.
We've been talking for several years about the importance of sharing information and benchmarks among provinces when it comes to wait times for critical surgery. There are other areas that are equally important, and it's a real frustration among constituents of mine when you talk about the wait time for getting a referral to a specialist, for example.
I'd like to hear from the experience of your provinces. What kind of work is being done in making this more open and transparent for citizens to know what the wait times are? Maybe they can compare notes with other provinces. But it's even for referring physicians in that example of the wait time to see a specialist. A constituent mentioned one time it was suspected they might have had Crohn's disease, so they were referred to a gastroenterologist, and then when they established the appointment with the gastroenterologist it was nine months before being able to have an endoscopy. So when you're told you have a fairly critical illness and you're told just wait for nine months, that's a very frustrating experience for a patient. But that referring physician might have been able to find a specialist who had a shorter wait time.
These are the kinds of situations that come up in health care.
Starting with you, Mr. Hume, what kinds of things is the Province of British Columbia doing in terms of open data around health care to improve the lives of citizens and patients?