Not bad, eh? I've been hanging around with you too long, or not long enough.
I have several recommendations. You all heard my opening remarks about my passion and compassion for this territory and more importantly, my corporate history with Laurentian University, and several developments, one of which is the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. Again, we are completely disheartened and we have taken on mass advocacy to lobby with government partners. The Northern Ontario School of Medicine was founded upon a tri-cultural relationship in the north with Goyce Kakegamic, Geoff Hudson and Dr. Augustine amongst many grassroots native people, along with our chieftains to ensure that we were creating a school in the north that remains in the north and that we provide expertise to the learners to break down the systemic racism in the health care system by identifying, recruiting and retaining aboriginal people and increasing their success rates in medicine to ensure that we can provide a platform of care for our people by our people.
We have been pushing to ensure that NOSM remains an accrediting body, which it already is, and maintains its degree-granting status. I will not fight with Thunder Bay and Sudbury and have the argument of northeast and northwest. That argument began in 1997, and I want to believe that we established a solution-based approach to ensuring that the medical learners had a vast geography to learn in.
I'm still uncertain how on earth they could have allowed funding that was specific to midwifery to be spent and not accounted for. I also note that other universities in the province of what you now call Ontario are trying to get dibs on our midwifery program, and I am completely against that. This midwifery program, just like NOSM, was created in the north by the north and needs to remain in the north.
I would strongly support and I plead with all of you for your influence to ensure that there is some accountability to retain Laurentian but, more importantly, if there's a way, to make NOSM degree-granting and to make midwifery its own school with its own authority and accountability process, partnered with NOSM.