Mr. Chair, what I would like to say is that we know that health care is a federal but also a provincial and territorial issue. If we look across this country, what the Royal Society of Canada paper has demonstrated is that some of the provinces and territories are taking on innovation and investing in innovation differently from others.
If I speak to the question you have asked, overall this is not a phenomenon that just came into play 10 years ago. The work I do globally tells me that the time when we pay attention to shortages and gaps in the health workforce is when there is a crisis of some kind. A crisis can be fiscal in nature; it can be a pandemic, or it can be a surge or a threat. When those critical points are not in place, then governments across this country oftentimes relax and become quite complacent with putting strategies in place to address the workforce.
In the example you have provided, COVID has helped us to appreciate that, indeed, oftentimes we need to think about alternative arrangements and options to ensure that Canadians across this country are receiving care.
During COVID—