Thank you, Ms. Chair, and thanks to the witnesses for being here today.
I'm from the southeast corner of British Columbia in the IHA region. You can feel sorry for me if you like. I was a member of the board of directors of the East Kootenay Foundation for Health as part of the regional district of East Kootenay, so I'm somewhat familiar with IHA and its delivery of primary health care in the Elk Valley, specifically to Sparwood, which lost its hospital in 2005 and went to a primary health care model.
Doctors have been in and out of that system throughout those years. It's been very hard to continue to retain them. Whether it be through the increase of taxation locally and a number of innovations that we did to try to keep them there, nothing worked. Once the incentive was gone, they were gone.
So I'm not one to think that taxation works because, as the mayor of that community for six years, I personally have seen it not work. What I did see work was once the primary health care model went to an opportunity to provide patients with things they could do to improve their health to avoid such problems as diabetes or obesity. A lot of those programs are provided within the primary health care model in Sparwood, anyway.
A lot of those things are found through electronic technology that we have that wasn't available even 10 years ago for that matter. What type of technology do you see in the future that is going to aid rural Canada with limited opportunities for physicians and/or nurses, for those clients who need to have access to the medical facilities they can't readily get to?