We need to have some national standards around indigenous health data collection. Statistics Canada was moving in that direction. I sit on the National Statistics Council, though, of course, I'm here as an individual today. When I first joined the council five to ten years ago they were meeting with our national aboriginal organizations and working on those kinds of partnerships, and there still is some good partnership work, but we need to have national standards.
I became a co-chair of a national committee on birth outcomes and we liaised with all five national aboriginal organizations. It can be done...the pieces to invest in the partnerships. In order to do that, the national aboriginal organizations have to be supported, and then to simply have proper data quality. That's the first course I took at Johns Hopkins in public health, if you take health informatics 101. As a physician, it's like I'm in the emergency room and I see people in incredible distress. I'm talking of hundreds of thousands of people with these urgent symptoms, but I don't have any diagnostic equipment to treat them with.
It's a sorry state of affairs for an affluent country like Canada.