I guess what's aggressive to one may be modest to another. But what we have to understand is that in the Canadian context, as a federation and with the separation of responsibilities, our ability to have a comprehensive--call it aggressive--or effective approach requires collaboration amongst many sectors. In a recent workshop that PHAC sponsored, bringing together representatives from provinces and all sectors of the injury prevention area, it was concluded that in the Canadian context, to be fully effective, it will require coordination of messaging, loose coordination of a cohesive response, and similar objectives and priorities so that we can make a concerted effort in given areas and slowly chip away at it.
That being said, I think as Madam Billings pointed out, the summation of the efforts that Canada has made over the last 30 years has been quite spectacular in reducing the injury rates overall. Are we the best? Not yet, and we have much, much more work to do, but we're definitely trending in the right direction on many injury types.
So I think we can.... Through initiatives like the PHN's review and work collaborations with the provinces, this group on injury prevention has looked at what other countries are doing and is trying to extract the best practice from other countries and see how we might adapt them to a Canadian context.