I'll just say—and this may or may not be known to members of the committee—that there are eight organizations that Health Canada funds, which play various roles in the health system. There's the cancer partnership, the Canadian Institute for Health Information, the Mental Health Commission, the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, the Patient Safety Institute, the Canada Health Infoway, and so on.
These organizations, which we describe as “shared governance organizations”, are managed.... In fact, most of them were created by the federal government, but they have federal, provincial, and territorial representation on them. They are intended to be highly responsive to needs identified across the country.
Unlike the CHT, which, as I mentioned, is a lot of money with an important accountability but really only in the area of the Canada Health Act, these other organizations have a specific responsibility in their particular area of interest. The Canada Health Infoway is specifically in the business of advancing electronic health records, and that sort of thing. The cancer partnership is dedicated to getting everybody in the cancer community working to the same objectives with the most important advances in cancer control and prevention.
I don't know if I would characterize it as saying that we have more control over those organizations. That's not really the main point I want to make. What I simply want to say is that they are clearly focused on their main business. There are not issues around whether or not, for example, the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer is spending money on something other than cancer. They can't, they don't, and they won't. They are really focused on their task.
The total cost to the federal government of these organizations I've just mentioned, in terms of budgetary allocation, is less than $400 million a year, which is not a large amount in the grand scheme of health care spending in Canada, which is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. They really do very important work with, as I say, relatively small resources, because of the very focused mandates they have and the governance that helps direct the work they do.