Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to clear up a bit of confusion that I see between my answer and Minister McPhee's answer. The escorts that I am talking about are non-medical escorts. They are not there to provide any kind of medical service. They are there to assist the person getting on and off the plane, to speak in the language of their origin, to accompany someone who's having a child, and so on and so forth. They are non-medical escorts.
We've had representation from people who would like the escort criteria to correspond with age. That is to say, if you're over a certain age, you would automatically receive an escort. It turns out now that the older you are, the more likely an escort will be approved, but that's not always the case.
Having a wider availability based on age is one possible way to address the question of how to bridge the gap for someone coming from a very small community to a city the size of Edmonton for medical services. It is truly bewildering in ways that those of us who have been in those big cities—