Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the question.
That's the million-dollar question, isn't it? We've been looking at these issues; I can tell you that I've been involved in this since the year 2000. At that time, the conference of deputy ministers directed the country to develop a nursing strategy for Canada to address the shortages in these ongoing issues.
I can share with the member, Chair, that I looked at it again this morning. It was published in 2000, if you want to look it up. The nursing strategy for Canada had a number of recommendations. Its first recommendation was to create a Canadian nursing advisory committee to talk about all these issues. I happen to have the honour of being the executive lead of that.
Again, I looked at those 51 recommendations. Hand to God, you could just change the date on both of those reports, and literally every single thing we're talking about today is exactly the same. There just has not been the will to make the kind of changes we need across the system. Frustratingly, some places do it very, very well, so one might ask why all the rest don't. Many hospitals in this country don't have any trouble recruiting people and retaining them. I would say don't even invent anything new: Just copy that and do it in other places. We know the solutions.
It's been a tremendous frustration, Chair, that we haven't seemed to be able to move the dial. I won't go into the rabbit hole of gender, but I am very, very concerned that this is not the case in workforces heavily dominated by men. I've watched it play out for almost 45 years.