Thank you.
Thanks for the presentation this morning. I think I speak for pretty much everyone around the table and across the country on the importance that the nursing profession has displayed over the past couple of years. It has gone very much above and beyond, in many cases, what would normally be expected.
I think doing this study on the heels of the pandemic is a little.... I'm a little concerned that it's going to be skewed by what we've been through as a globe over the past two years, but I think what it also showed to me is this. For background purposes, I spent two years as health minister in the province of Alberta, so I had some opportunities to deal with the system. It seems to me that we have some major structural issues with health care in the country. Number one, we spend all of our time, or almost all of our time, treating the ill—the sickness side of health care—and we don't spend nearly enough time on the preventative side.
I'd like to know, from both of the two union leaders who have spoken here today, whether you as organizations are working with provincial governments primarily, because they are the ones who deliver health care, to look at fixing structural issues in health care. I don't believe that simply throwing more money at a situation that is structurally in need of repair is the right answer.
I guess I'm more interested in what your two organizations are doing at the provincial and federal levels in trying to see if some of these issues can be worked back and whether we can say we have a structural issue here that we need to deal with before we can fix the problem your members are dealing with on a daily basis.
I'd just like a couple of comments on that.