I'll try to address all of your issues.
On the issue of prevention, I think every association sitting at this table understands that we need to have a healthy population and to maintain the health of the population. That will ultimately be the best way to reduce the demands on our health system. Of course, that's going to require the participation of health workers as well, particularly in the primary health care system that is going to keep people well, the public health system, and those kinds of things. Those are still health workers.
I'm sure if you look at any of our pre-budget briefs to your colleagues on the finance committee, you'll see that the Canadian Healthcare Association and others focus on the importance of keeping people healthy, managing chronic diseases, and those kinds of things. That's understood.
We're talking about a planning mechanism to meet the needs of the future. That's going to be one of the important focuses of the attention of the health system, and it always should be. We're still going to need the appropriate workers to do that. But when people are ill and need the attention of the health system, we need workers to take care of their needs as well. It's the health system of the future that we're talking about preparing for when we're talking about some kind of pan-Canadian mechanism.
You mentioned the issue of provincial jurisdiction and the federal responsibility for aboriginal people, which is not working now--look at the health status there. We're talking about whether federal funding is adequate or not. Those are issues we tend to deal with at the finance committee. The truth is there is a federal role in the area of health human resources.
We've just heard all about mobility, not only among provinces but around the world. My association is a federation, and provincial hospitals or health care associations belong to it. All they say at our board table is, “You just raised the ante by having a tremendously generous remuneration policy. Now we're going to lose 30% of our front-line providers to you.”
Unless we have an integrated approach and a way of stopping that from happening, we're going to be training people in one province to go to work in another. We've heard that before, so we need to coordinate. That doesn't mean the federal government runs it; it means there's a table or mechanism where everybody is together to agree to a pan-Canadian approach using appropriate research and data.
By the way, there is a lot of research on the retention of the appropriate workforce. For instance, in healthy workplaces you value each worker and share work properly; there's an absence of violence; there's support from management--frankly, my members have to play their rightful roles; people have control over their practices; and there's recognition of the work they do. In other words, a healthy, broadly defined workplace environment is the responsibility of the employers, but it's also the responsibility of governments that could help perhaps set the tone as to what constitutes the kind of environment to retain and recruit health workers for the future.
I think it's important to note that the involvement of the federal government is no guarantee of success, but certainly contributing and being at the table is important. It's not just the provinces alone, it's everybody together. I think that's the message we'd like to leave.