Thank you.
Welcome, guests. It seems that MPs from northwestern Ontario are a dime a dozen today, including Eric and me.
The indigenous communities in northwestern Ontario have, I think, done pretty well with the pandemic and haven't been that affected by it. I think they've done a really good job. Certainly, one of the concerns, however, is with the dependence on health care referral centres in more southern places. In northwestern Ontario, that isn't such a problem, because Thunder Bay is on the receiving end and Thunder Bay doesn't have a lot of COVID cases either.
Manitoba, however, used to be really good, but now places like Norway House, where I worked before as a doctor.... We used to refer all our cases, including pregnant women, to Winnipeg, which is obviously potentially a big problem now. Similarly to Mr. Obed, I worked in Iqaluit, and the more complicated medical cases there went either to Montreal or to Ottawa. Again, there's a big concern regarding possible source of transmission when people come back from health services.
My question is, what are you doing to ensure that you don't get transmission that way? Are you just getting people to self-isolate for a couple of weeks? Is there enforcement of that? Have you considered possibly changing referral centres so that instead of sending people from Iqaluit to Montreal, you send them to somewhere that has a lower number of cases?
The other concern is that people who are sick have to go to those places, but also.... Say you're in Norway House and you've been having chest pains. You'll want to get a stress test. You may not want to go to Winnipeg, given the concern about COVID in Winnipeg. Similarly, if you need a colonoscopy and you are from.... I guess Iqaluit can do them, but if there are other kinds of testing, you'd have to be sent down. I would think that's a concern, that we're not picking up cases early enough because of people not wanting to go to the referral centres.
I leave those questions to anybody who wants to answer them.