Certainly that is a vision. I wouldn't, in practical terms, see it happening soon. On the other hand, I think it would be useful to have regular discussions around the key question of how different provinces are regulating, just for the benefit of having those discussions. The federal government would never say, “Now we are going to do this”, but if there were a means of starting those discussions and if they were seen to be taking place, I would think it would be extraordinarily useful. Otherwise, everybody's redoing everybody else's work. However, I know people have spent entire careers working on interprovincial trade and the removal of trade barriers, so I wouldn't see it happening any time soon.
There's another thing. I don't know what the research budget is for this committee, but it would be really interesting to make the point that you can't really talk about health human resources without understanding what the actual organization of the services is going to look like and having a go at pointing out that if services were organized in a certain way, we'd need this many of this kind of profession and that many of that kind. In a sense it is similar to Jeanne's point that at a very micro level, in calculating the cost of running a surgical floor and the nurses to be allocated, you can't say you'll need this many nurses with that training, because it depends who else is there. It would be very important to make the point that it's the way in which services are actually organized and financed that determines how many of which profession you're going to need.
As an illustration, I know the Conference Board of Canada, together with the Ontario Medical Association, was trying out a model in Ontario that just looked at doctors. What's wrong with that model is that it assumes we're only looking at doctors and only looking at the current organization of services, so it gives you just one answer. If you were able to hypothesize a number of different ways of organizing services and then do the modelling, it would make the point very clearly that it's how the services are organized and financed that determines what the spread of different service providers needs to be. It would be a big contribution just to make that point.