Thank you very much, Chair.
Thanks to all three of you for your excellent presentations.
We'll each be asking questions, so I'm going to focus my questions for the moment to Ms. Bard and deal with the nursing shortage in particular.
I know that the two challenges are both retention and the attraction of new nurses to the field, and I want to explore that a little further. Yesterday we had a witness who said that we needed to change the narrative in attracting people, and I think there is much merit to that with respect to the health field as well.
We've seen a bit of credential creep, if you will, whereby nurses who want to enter the field need to have increasingly higher levels of education. Yet, because of the way salaries are negotiated in the field, these aren't really keeping pace with the cost of that education. It's difficult to attract young people to a field where the tuition fees are unbelievably high.
I wonder if you would comment on whether it might make sense to explore ways to reduce the barriers to that kind of education, whether it's through incentive programs and loan forgiveness perhaps—if nurses were to practise in areas where there are acute shortages.
If you're comfortable with this, I'm going to pose a whole whack of questions and then turn the floor over to you for answers to all of them.
If we're changing the narrative in the nursing profession, I do know that it's one of the professions that has the highest rates of occupational injury and that retaining nurses is incredibly difficult in an environment where sick days are often higher than the national average. You've largely addressed that.
We are now also faced with a policy on the government's part, where we're potentially going to increase the age at which people can collect the OAS from 65 to 67. Nursing is an unbelievably physically demanding occupation. I wonder if you could comment on whether it would be possible for nurses to continue to work until they're 67 and do the jobs they're doing. Again, that speaks to retention, but perhaps from a bit of a different angle.
And lastly, I'm from Ontario, and I remember the Mike Harris years. The premier, I think, infamously compared nurses to hula hoops, that their time had come and gone. At that time we had a huge out-migration of nurses from Ontario to the States in particular—to Florida and Arizona—which then created a shortage at home from which I don't think we've recovered.
If we're looking at retention of nurses, there are work environment morale issues as well. I wonder if you could speak to that and give us some guidance as to what we can do, as federal legislators, to improve the work environment in all three of those respects.
Thank you.