Absolutely. We are not proposing any federal role in health human resource planning. This is clearly a provincial issue. But we are saying that the federal government could be enabling, a tool that all jurisdictions could contribute to and draw upon to inform their own provincial process. We are very clear about the jurisdictional issues and know that asking the federal government to take a planning role would be a non-starter.
But what the jurisdictions have told us—and we've now spoken to all jurisdictions—is, if what you're talking about is creating a place were we can—I'm going to oversimplify—upload our data, our needs within our population, the demographic information of our population, help you do national trending, and also allow us to upload our supply and how that's changing, and if that will allow you to create a national picture that we can then take into account as we plan, we would love that.
But the centre is not about telling provinces what they should do, it's about saying, “Well, if you're going to produce 10% less of this, you should know that your neighbouring provinces, which you draw the most upon, are also producing y and z”. It's about sharing that information, because right now the jurisdictions are not aware, necessarily, of who's producing what, what the needs are, and what the needs are going to be in 5 to 10 years. That's the challenge. This is really about information flow. The precedent with things like CIHI exists where the federal government helps in terms of national data and analysis, even, but we are stopping at that point.
Thank you for the opportunity to clarify.