Thank you very much.
Minister, I'm very interested in health human resources, because we know that wait times will never go down unless we have people to provide the care, and that's a huge part of the waiting list problem. It's mostly a management problem, but a big chunk of it has to do with health human resources.
I noticed that in your presentation you talked about “four new programs totaling $18 million dollars to help increase the number of health professionals working in Canada”, and that this will help “to reduce barriers and build bridges and to help internationally-educated health professionals secure their proper place in Canada's workforce”.
As a Liberal government, we had in fact put $67 million into increasing the number of health professionals working in Canada, so this $18 million is a drop in the bucket when you stop to think that reducing barriers and building bridges means providing training spots, internship spots, and residency spots for physicians. We know that the cost of one of those spots is $60,000 a year. It's not just the dollar cost, but it's where they are going to get the space to train in, because our tertiary care centres are filled.
These were some of the very real problems, and as the person responsible for that file in the last government, I have to tell you that we put in $68 million in a year, and we thought that was an absolute drop in the bucket.
Now I notice that you're saying $18 million would provide 1,000 new physicians, 800 nurses, and 500 other health professions. I don't understand how that math adds up at all. It is totally impossible to achieve those results with $18 million. I'd like to know how you propose to do this, other than to just talk about vaguely reducing barriers and building bridges, because you need absolute spaces and you need absolute funding to fund those spaces.