Minister Diab, you can probably guess what I'm going to ask you because I've asked you the same question a hundred times in other situations.
Yes, we have too many immigrants in big cities like Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto. That's causing problems. We've decided to reduce our numbers. However, in rural areas, we have the opposite problem. We don't have enough people to work in various sectors, but probably nowhere is this more apparent than in health care.
I'm going to give you an example from my riding, which is at Riverside health, which is Fort Frances to the Manitoba border. It's in the west of my riding. They run the health care system there.
Their numbers are from August. For temporary foreign workers, they have 43 PSWs and two registered nurses. They rely heavily on agency staff from places like Toronto because they don't have enough workers. They have to pay these agency staff more. They have 50 agency staff and they currently have a shortage there of 28 registered nurses, 17 RPNs and 11 PSWs. They can't find people to recruit.
Never mind that in Emo, they've had to shut the ambulance services because they don't have paramedics to work there. In Rainy River, they've closed their health centre at the moment because they have no doctors.
When we're cutting our numbers across the board, whether it's temporary foreign workers or immigrants, what can you do to reassure rural Canada that those cuts aren't going to further compromise our existing health care system?