I'll try to ask a question briefly.
First of all, with regard to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples from 1996 or 1997, one recommendation that always stood out in my mind was the one that said there should be 10,000 first nations health care providers trained to be part of local community health and wellness. I've often wondered, how far did we get? Did we even get up to 500? I don't know. That's just a little bit of history that I remember.
I want to come back to the issue of pain management. It seems to me there's a very fine balance here. On the one hand, we're dealing with prescription misuse. But if we come down too hard, rigidly taking away drugs, or don't make them accessible to people, or don't believe people, actually, when they are in pain....
This is a huge issue for people with addictions. People don't believe them when they say they're in pain. It's like, “Oh, you just want to get drugs.” So if we come down too hard, we're actually not creating a better situation, we're making it worse.
How do we create that balance? That's one of the things I think we have to struggle with. To me, part of the answer might be, and I'm interested in your opinion here, where those decisions are made. I mean, you could say there's some big national decision to take away this drug, or take away that drug, but the more local we make it in terms of that individual and what they need, are we not then striking a better balance?
Pain management is a real issue. If you take it away from people, then yes, they'll turn to illegal means. What else do they have? People are suffering.
I just wondered if you could respond to that. How do we approach this question of the right balance between not being too rigid and not having a system that's so open that, yes, it can be abused easily?