I can tell you that we have a large number of international medical graduates who reside in Canada. A lot of them are Canadians who have gone to international medical schools. They are not people coming from other countries with education from there. They are people who have grown up in Canada or are born in Canada and have gone to international medical schools.
I can tell you that we have a plan in place right now to staff our organization in a phased manner, because we have shut down surgeries and we have shut down a lot of elective work. Initially, we are going to be using that staff to fill any gaps we may have. After that, we will reach out to the community, to our community physicians or specialists who are practising in the community. They are not practising in a hospital, but they are volunteering to step up.
To answer your question, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario has worked with the province to allow international medical graduates to have a renewing one-month licence in Ontario. This means that at Osler, if we get to a point where we run out of local resources for physician staffing, we would hire international medical graduates and give them a job letter. When the graduates present that job letter to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario as a licensing body, they would have a one-month licence to work with us, and then we could renew that on a monthly basis.
I think it's a great idea to put that in place, because it creates a stopgap measure for us here in this province. I would encourage the federal government to recommend that other provinces go down the same path, because most of these international medical graduates would be willing to travel anywhere in Canada to gain that experience. Not only will it help us now, but it will help these international medical graduates to get residencies in the next couple of years, because they will have local Canadian experience.