I appreciate the question very much. It does seem to me that the distinction between the coverage we have of physician services and hospital services, in accordance with the principles set out in the Canada Health Act of universality, comprehensiveness, accessibility, and so on, and the failure to include drugs administered outside of hospital, are very troubling. That's one of the reasons it's so important that the committee is undertaking such an extensive and thorough study of this topic. The distinction between the two and the different treatment of the two have been challenged by a number of commissions and reports over the years. This goes all the way back to Mr. Hall's commission report in 1964, in which he didn't suggest different treatment of the two, and the Romanow report also recommended remedying that gap in the coverage.
My sense is that the exclusion of drugs administered outside of hospital was not a matter of principle, but rather a sense that we had to take incremental steps. The surprising thing is that we haven't taken this step yet, and here we are half a century or more later. I think Canadians are increasingly troubled by that and the burdens that it places on people in different parts of the country and in different situations within provinces. This is very troubling and has serious consequences for their lives and their health.
We need to explore this very seriously. We need to consider the best route to fix it, the most feasible and practical way of fixing it. That is certainly why I'm happy to be here today. The constitutional pathways and the need to explore them are important to discover how to fix this problem.