This question is for Dr. Ouellet. I enjoyed your presentation. I thought you had some great suggestions. I particularly liked the suggestion on capacity building.
In my riding of Barrie we just set up a satellite campus for the U of T, to start training on July 1, with five and then nine students. It will be a full-time satellite medical campus. The challenge the community has is they're told if you want to do that, you have to raise $6 million on your own to pay for the building. That's tough for a community to do. The community will find a way to do it, but it's obviously not fair.
So suggestions of how you can make it easier for communities, such as a federal loan capacity, like we have in other infrastructure programs, is a noteworthy suggestion.
What I wanted to ask you about is this. You talked about self-sufficiency and repatriating some of these physicians we have abroad. The challenge of self-sufficiency is that it's a long-term goal and it's not going to happen overnight. We have this huge challenge immediately.
An interesting aspect about getting some of these physicians back...there are so many who are practising abroad; I think you're right on that. The challenge is, what if these physicians have the same problem getting into the system? Wouldn't the physician who went to medical school in Ireland or a physician who went to medical school in the Caribbean have the same challenge coming back to Canada, in that there wouldn't be a residency spot available? Wouldn't we run into the same problem we're facing with IMGs?