Thank you very much, Chair.
In view of the fact that it is National Nursing Week, my first question will be for Mr. Villeneuve.
I will have my T-shirt at the ready. Tomorrow is International Nurses Day and I will wear it with enthusiasm to celebrate our wonderful front-line nurses.
Thank you so much for giving that shout-out to public health nurses who are not quite as visible as the nurses on the front line. I know here in the York region that our public health nurses have been working around the clock on contact tracing which, as you know, is a very detailed type of activity. It's very time-consuming and requires considerable skill as, obviously, some people really do not want to disclose exactly what they have been doing for the previous 14 days.
Going back to the issue of mental health, there's a strain on our front-line workers, which I think is self-evident. My recollection post-SARS certainly in the GTA was that a number of nurses did take early retirement following the SARS epidemic and the work and stress that they had been involved in.
I know the Canadian Nurses Association has been concerned about shortages in the nursing profession, so are you thinking ahead to consequences post-COVID as to what that's going to look like from a labour point of view?