Thank you.
I think it may be a little too early to say there is a consensus throughout the country, but nevertheless we have now met with hundreds of Canadians in 13 cities during the 15 meetings we have held. We have also launched an on-line consultation through which we gathered over 1,700 detailed answers to our framework document aimed at developing a mental health strategy for Canada.
Insofar as a consensus is possible on a such a complex issue as mental health, we believe we have received significant support from the stakeholders in this area. We have gathered in a room representatives of the various provincial and territorial governments, of health care providers and people with mental health problems. We have had detailed discussions on the eight objectives we are putting forward in our framework document and asked the participants to vote on each objective using a grading scale from 1 to 5. For all objectives, the resulting score was between 4 and 5. There seems to be significant support for all these objectives. Participants also made suggestions for improving our document or some aspects of our work that they found weak. There were also suggestions about ways to improve our approach to those issues.
Generally, we feel that people want to cooperate with the commission and that they support the work we have done up to now. We recognize this is only a beginning. We are looking to a better future in the area of mental health, but we know that we still have lots of work to do before we can determine the best way to reach these objectives. Based on the consultations we have held and which were completed last week, we conclude that our general direction enjoys a great degree of support.