I apologize. I was thinking at the end that there's just one more thing on my list that might bear looking into, at least from a cost-benefit analysis. It's something that has only been in the news a bit, but I'm sensitive to it.
I had many jobs concurrently with emergency medicine. In one of them, I spent several years as a medical director for Manitoba's Emergency Medical Services system. There is a lot of concern regarding the role of EMS and ambulance service in the health care system, particularly with the inconsistency of fees charged for this service and when all the other parts of the health care system, other than drugs, are paid for. You do get an ambulance bill, and it can be very expensive. It depends on where you are and how far you have to go. It can be a couple of hundred dollars if you're in a major city, but it can be several thousand dollars if you are in a rural area.
One of the problems is that as it stands right now, for some reason, emergency medical services are not really part of the Canada Health Act services. They're considered a municipal or provincial service and are paid for out of those budgets. Every jurisdiction has to come up with ways to recover costs, because, as you might imagine, it's an expensive service to provide.
We do know that there are people having some adverse outcomes because they're not calling an ambulance. They know they can't afford the bill. In particular, these are people with chronic medical conditions who have frequent hospital visits.
Some of the calls that I received personally during the campaign were about this, so it might be worth looking into seeing if there's a way to put EMS under the umbrella of health in Canada.