I'll start.
Mr. Liepert, I have to say that you must be a happy man that you weren't Minister of Health during the pandemic.
I will start with your comments around the study perhaps being skewed because we're still in a pandemic. That is a reality. If the committee reads any of the submissions of CNFU from prior to the pandemic, it will see that prior to the pandemic we had a health care human resource shortage. Today we're in a crisis. Nationally, 25% of nurses are saying they are going to leave health care completely, and 50% are saying they want to change jobs. Over my 18 years, I have never seen that.
When you say there is a problem structurally, one thing we have to admit is that we have a few too many queens and kings out there who are trying to manage their own health care system, when we have a country governed under the Canada Health Act and we need to work together. We're way too small a country to have so many different strategies, so many programs.
When you were part of the provincial government, but also the federal government, I'm sure you worked with the building trades and the building sector. They're big in Alberta. They have an agency that looks at how many construction workers we need in this country. That has existed for many years. We have nothing like that for close to a million workers who work in health care in Canada. That's when we say the federal government needs to have the proper data, proper strategy and proper funding for one of the largest human resources in this country. That's why we're talking about an agency or a body. We can call it whatever we want.
I totally agree with you that we need to switch gears. We need to talk about prevention. My first report to the federal and provincial governments, way back when, was in New Brunswick in early 1990. It talked about community health centres. We need to make sure we provide prevention and home care, and that we include mental health, of course, but we need to make sure we have a good acute care sector when we need it. That's truly important. I think all unions are willing to work with you and with all provincial and territorial governments on this.