If you have a national unique identifier and associate it with a person when he or she starts going to graduate school, I guess to post-secondary school, it will also allow you to know more about what's happening in the university or the college. You could look at dropout rates, and that's a value-added.
The cost was an issue. But there are also issues regarding the role of the regulatory bodies at the provincial level. There was some discussion about governance, about the institute that would manage a national unique identifier. So what CIHI did was mainly a feasibility study, and it came up with the cost. It wasn't clear that CIHI would be the organization that would run that national unique identifier.
In terms of privacy, we're talking about professionals. They have some obligations. I don't think privacy is a barrier. Things need to be done in a privacy-sensitive manner, but that's not a barrier to creating such a national unique identifier.