We've actually, just in the last few months, started looking. We had funding from HRSDC to look at a lot of these issues. Prior to this, only medicine and nursing had funding to look at health human resource issues. Now some of the other professions are getting money, and pharmacy, fortunately, is one of them, but there certainly need to be more.
I don't think there's really been any study yet on how that MRA that was signed five years ago has worked. We do know it takes a lot less time. Alberta is a fairly attractive province for pharmacists, and I don't think they're a big exporter of pharmacists. Some other provinces, like Saskatchewan, export a lot of their pharmacy graduates. Still, the challenge in rural areas is huge. The pharmacists there, when they want to sell their stores, often can't find anybody to sell them to, or they can't get anybody to come in and do a locum so that they can actually take some time off. It is a big challenge, but we don't yet have the data, and that's one of the things that we need across the profession--better data. We're starting to collect that, and we'll be able to tell you more in a year from now about just what the really big challenges are.
It certainly is a concern in smaller towns and rural areas to actually have a pharmacist, because often that might be the only health care provider who's there. They may not have a family physician, but at least if they have a pharmacist, it is somewhat of a help.