Okay, I'll start.
I think we have to ask ourselves why we have one of the most expensive health systems in the world and we're not performing. We had a Pollara poll done in December 2007 in which 68% of the Canadian public felt that the health system needed a complete overhaul or rebuild. You may not believe Canada's World Health Organization ranking of 30th, or the OECD ranking of 18 out of 20, or the recent European consumer ranking that put us at 23 alongside 29 European countries and last in terms of value for money.
Canadians are spending a lot of money to get inadequate service, and I think unless we look at the system—which we're not doing—and unless we look at things like the way we fund the system.... The biggest single cost is hospital care, and it is not being done efficiently. It is 30% of the total budget. If we could save a lot of money in that area, we can look after rural and aboriginal health.
The other thing—which no one has really brought up in any detail—is the public-private thing. It doesn't matter whether I would philosophically support the private sector, because Canada does not have any private hospital infrastructure, so we have to solve it within public hospitals, and it can be solved by making them more efficient.
I think our study earlier this year showed that for just four areas in the accord, it costs $15 billion to keep people on wait lists. There is now a study out on the Stats Canada website showing that the costs of mental health to the economy in one year are $51 billion. This is money going down the drain. We're wasting a lot of money in Canada, and we need to fix that.