Yes. I think the committee has noted that we need to strengthen Canada's health system, and my report is focused on the public health system, but it's part of the health system as a whole. Given the enormous challenges of the pandemic, my message is also to recognize the prevention, health promotion and preparedness aspects, not just the response. We need to get ourselves well set up for any future complex public health issues, including climate change and anti-microbial resistance.
My recommendations really fall into four different streams, one actually on workforce capacity, and the second on some of the tools that are needed to modernize our health system, and this means at every level of the public health system, not focused on the Public Health Agency, but on the local, the provincial and the federal systems, so that we're better set up with data, for example, as one of the tools, and also to address things like misinformation in the social media age.
The third aspect is governance. We need to have a modernization of governance, recognizing the multisectoral nature of some of the work we do, including the pandemic response, and of course the financing of the public health system as well, because it is a very small proportion of the health spending in different jurisdictions. It's very difficult to estimate how much that budget is, but CIHI, the Canadian Institute for Health Information, estimates it is probably not more than 6%. If we want to be better supported in our pandemic response in the future, we've got to strengthen the public health system.