Thank you for the question.
Health Canada, as you've noted, does provide a range of health care programs and services to first nations and Inuit. We don't provide all health care services, and much of the difficulty in collecting data is the fact that we don't provide all services.
We do continue to support the collection of data. We have supported the First Nations Regional Longitudinal Health Survey, which is administered by the Assembly of First Nations. Results from the first cycle of that survey were released in November 2005, and we've committed $12.5 million to support infrastructure, data collection, and dissemination for the next survey, with results expected in 2010. So the frequency with which we get data on the first nations and Inuit people doesn't match our two-year cycle for Healthy Canadians.
We've also contributed $5 million, in collaboration with other departments for a total of $40 million, to fund Statistics Canada's 2006 on- and off-reserve Aboriginal Peoples Survey. That's an omnibus survey that collects information from first nations, Inuit, and Métis on health and social determinants of health indicators. That information was released in December 2008, and we look forward to further studies on that information.
We're an active participant on the federal-provincial-territorial task force on aboriginal health data and indicators, which is overseeing provincial- and territorial-led pilot projects aimed at improving existing aboriginal health data sources.