Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to all of you for coming and for your important work.
I'm really concerned about the disparity between rural and urban areas. I found that rural Canadians have the highest death rates from causes such as circulatory disease, injury, respiratory disease, and suicide, compared with their urban counterparts. If we look, 21% of Canadians live in rural areas, yet 9.4% of physicians work in rural and remote areas.
My questions are these. To what extent are the health disparities between rural and urban Canadians the result of the shortage? And what does it mean in terms of, for example, emergency care, surgical care, and treatment following?