I think it's a great question, one that I don't have a simple answer to. One of the few benefits of the COVID situation currently is that it has increased the sense of community and collaboration across the country and between organizations and such. This is a topic that's been spoken about for years, and, again, even prior to this pandemic there was talk by some about a pan-Canadian licence.
It would require collaboration and communication amongst the different provincial colleges, whether we're talking about the college of physicians for the various provinces or other professional governing bodies, to essentially communicate and collaborate. It wouldn't be that difficult because we already have to register most of our documents and most of our other qualifications online. It would essentially just be a matter of provincial colleges co-operating and coming up with some type of formula to be able to make this work. It is something that could happen very quickly. Take a process that takes currently a couple of months and whittle it down to something that could take a couple of weeks, or maybe even a couple of days. The requirements are almost identical across all provinces. These boundaries that we've formed over time just need to be broken down so we will be able to provide the services to the people who need them.
Again, there was a survey last year of Canadian physicians, which showed that 90% of the doctors in Canada thought it would improve access to care across the country if we were able to do this, and about 50% of those physicians would be willing to do locums in various provinces, with a similar number of people willing to do virtual care.