I think one of the things that we are starting to do actually here in Canada is to combine hospitals and long-term care and assisted living, creating a community of those facilities. Rather than closing all our tiny hospitals and closing all of those things in small communities, we can combine all of the services to make them one real service.
I grew up in a tiny town in northern Ontario, and I've seen it work there. It's working in some of the Nordic countries. We were in a place in northern Sweden—we go in for over a week with a team of 14 people to look at these places—and their nursing home is physically part of the town swimming pool and the town recreation program. It's all one great big community. The cinema is there. By integrating all of the services, I think that we could do that in some of the small rural communities in a way that would keep them there.
The other problem for people in rural areas, which we heard about earlier, is the question of transportation. Of course, it's magnified for people in rural communities, which is something we need to look at as well.
I think step number one is combining services and keeping the hospitals. If you're old, you can't live in some place that is 60 miles away from a hospital, especially in Canada, given our weather, so you need to have those kinds of services there. We could do that by combining them rather than eliminating them.