I want to thank you, gentlemen, for your powerful words.
I'm going to start with a technical question to the doctor and then go to Grand Chief Solomon because of his expertise in the region I come from.
Doctor, I get messages on Facebook from mothers in motels in Timmins asking me to get them an extra day of treatment before their child goes home. Then I see the kids in the community, and they're like a mess because that day wasn't enough. Then their pictures are on Facebook, and people are asking, “How did this happen?”
I remember talking to Chief Solomon and saying, “Am I remembering this correctly, Chief, or is this some kind of nightmare I had where the nurses were carrying water in buckets from the river to the nurses' station in Kashechewan?” He said, “No, that was true. That happened.”
I hear you, and you're talking about telehealth. We don't have telephones. This is 2016.
Children are dying because they don't have pain medication, because they don't have Ventolin. I think we have to say that it's not good enough to say we're going to study this. We need change immediately, and I hear the call that this budget has to be augmented immediately because children are dying.
If you could give us one recommendation to give power to the doctors so they could not be overridden by the bureaucrats to deny children their services, what would that tool be that you need as a doctor when you say that child is going to get that extra time in a hospital, they're going to get the extra support here? What is it you need as authority so you can override those bureaucrats in Ottawa?