Thank you.
There are a lot of questions there, and with all due respect, sir, I think there is a bit of tainting there of the province that you live in—and that I live in, as it happens.
For the record, none of that $1 billion that was spent in Ontario was federal funds that were wasted. For all the federal funds that went into Ontario we got absolute results. They have a world-class telehealth system, by the way, and we helped fund that telehealth system. A few years ago in Ontario, a senior would show up at a hospital and they would have absolutely no idea what medication that senior was on. We changed that and encouraged them to put the Ontario drug database, the ODB system, into the hospitals. As of last year, they had a million hits on that file; now they are actually looking at what individual medications they were on.
So we've had, with our federal funds, a lot of successes in Ontario. The moneys that were reported on were clearly moneys that we had no dealings with and didn't spend.
In terms of strategic plans, absolutely Infoway has from the get-go had a strategic plan in place. It manifests itself in terms of the priority areas and the programs that we would invest in. We had over 600 people involved in consensus building around the blueprint and the architecture as provinces began their work. Clearly, over time, as new technologies come along and as new learning comes along, you have to go back to revisit and refresh your plans or take them to a deeper level. That is exactly what we did six years on.
If you sat in Alberta and had an electronic health record with 20,000 users; if you sat in British Columbia and had a fully functioning pharmacy system; if you sat in Nova Scotia or Newfoundland and had all your community pharmacists on the system; or if you had an entire province digitized, I believe, sir, you would have a different opinion. A lot of progress has been achieved. I will say this: clearly, the larger the province and jurisdiction you are, the tougher the job is. It is tough for Quebec and it is tough for Ontario. Then, if you get hiccups in terms of management, hiccups in terms of governance, those plans take that much longer.
From where we sit, we can encourage them, we can incent them, but we can't do the job for them.