Let me answer your question in some sense and also come back to the first one a little.
The first question in particular seemed to assume that the labour market for nurses is similar to a private sector labour market, and I would argue that is not a useful way to think about it. I think it's the same in relation to the question you're posing now.
A COPS model does not work very well for physicians and nurses, because there is only one employer for 99% of physicians and nurses, namely the provincial governments; and demand for physicians and nurses can turn on a dime with a provincial budget or a series of provincial budgets. If a province is in deficit, the number of nurses being hired goes down dramatically, and it's the same with physicians. Since the provincial governments have substantial control over the number of places in medical schools, for example, they can reduce the supply very substantially.
Even though right now there's this popular perception of a shortage of nurses, there are actually a substantial number of unemployed nurses.
The problem is that this is not a private sector where you have supply and demand that equilibrate, but a situation where you have in each province a union that negotiates with the province and comes up with a wage or a set of fees for physicians. It's not a market the way you might think about a market, the way the first question posited a private sector market. It's not like that.
I think this is a situation where provincial governments plan and the provincial governments hire, though there are some rare exceptions. They are pretty much the only people who hire. There is a popular perception of shortages because physician and nursing care is for the most part free in Canada, but there is also a perception that taxes are too high, so we don't want to pay for that physician and nursing care that we think we have a shortage of.
Fundamentally, our medicare system makes this a political problem, whereby everybody wants free medicare but doesn't want to pay the taxes to pay for the free medicare.
I don't think there's an easy solution to this. I don't think that the private sector models fit. I think what we need more than anything else is really good provincial planning. This is a provincial responsibility at the end of the day, but that can be facilitated by really good assistance from the federal government in providing planning assistance, information, data, and the like.
As much as CIHI does have great data on some things, it doesn't yet have great data on everything, and not at the detailed level that provinces need for planning.
I think that type of information would be extremely useful to provinces and aid the kind of capacity that HRSDC has for planning. A lot of the provinces could use assistance with that type of detailed planning.