Thank you very much. I could say all of the above; indeed, all of those points are extremely relevant.
We have talked with our membership. We are engaging with them all the time, and we do focus on the fact that lots of work has been done around the country in a patchwork. There are all kinds of pilot projects that are taking place, but what is needed is a comprehensive set of strategies that can only come with a national conversation.
The health accord presents the opportunity for the federal government to set aside money to actually fund these initiatives, but a condition of having that money transferred to the provinces is to set certain national standards, certain national priorities, and to ensure there's accountability for the money being spent. In observing and reviewing the work that has been done according to the existing accords, we find the accountability is lacking.
While there may be projects that are happening—we know a few of them are very promising—we're not certain the knowledge is being shared. A lot of good work and a lot of serious money has been spent, so I think the federal role, and there is definitely a federal role, is to set the large framework. The coordination, the strategy, the accountability is implicitly a federal role.
The provinces, of course, have to deliver. Even in the latest elections this fall, all of them addressed many of these issues in a patchwork. They all had pieces of the puzzle, but none of them had the whole. The single most important message for us is that there be an overall framework.
The second piece, and I want to re-emphasize this because it's important from the point of view of fiscal management, is home care was identified as the next essential service to respond to an impending challenge, which is valid all by itself. But we feel that it's also important because it has the opportunity of restructuring the health care budget for the future. We're worried about its sustainability. We're hearing arguments for private pay, etc., and yet we're not looking at restructuring our actual delivery of those health care dollars and using them more appropriately. The opportunity arises with home care and caregiver support to actually divert a massive amount of demand, and therefore the opportunity to also put our fiscal books in balance.
Those would be our major recommendations for the federal role.