Well, thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be asked to address the committee.
I'm going to be addressing it from a particular perspective, as a physician who did practise clinical medicine for about 20 years all told, but not for most of the last 15 years. Now I mainly do consulting work as a public health physician for provincial government health authorities and health organizations, primarily around health care policy.
I'm certainly happy to be sharing this time with Marc-André and Steven, who can both address a very important issue around pharmaceutical policy. I will hardly touch on that.
I'm mainly going to quickly talk about the arguments around the sustainability of our health care system, which go to the newspaper headlines, and the kind political pressures that the health care system is feeling these days.
Then I will try to make some arguments about the need for best practices, to fix a lot of the—