Through you, Mr. Chair, thank you for your question.
We've been looking at this actively. There are a number of things currently under way in our profession and others that are trying to address the issues you raise.
The two issues I would raise briefly are that, first, it's a dual problem of recruitment and then retention. There seems to be some evidence that if you train health care professionals—particularly doctors—who come from rural and remote areas, and have some training there, you can improve recruitment and retention.
There is a new medical school in northern Ontario, which just started, that is designed to do this. There are some outreach training programs now under way that actually train people in those communities with technological hookups to the medical school.
As we speak, there is a project from the University of Sherbrooke to train rural physicians in New Brunswick. There is a second project in the planning stage at Dalhousie University being designed to do the same in your native province.
The second point you touched on in your question at the beginning was the issue of the outflow of physicians to other countries, particularly to the United States. We have some data now that seems to show that for the first time last year, the net inflow of doctors from the United States into Canada was positive, rather than the other way around.
We think we know some reasons for this, so we've set up communications with the American Medical Association to get data on how many Canadians are practising in the United States, where they're practising, and how many of them might be interested in coming back to Canada.
One of the proposals we're looking at is a one time only financial incentive for this to happen.