Those are numbers that I'm not prepared with right in front of my hands as I'm sitting here. It's 20% of babies in Ontario. It's not the highest in the country. In B.C., midwives are delivering 25% and have probably exceeded that by now, whereas in provinces with smaller numbers of midwives, of course, that number could be quite a bit lower. I think that nationwide the number is probably at about 12% of babies across Canada delivered into the hands of midwives.
Ontario is where the first midwifery program launched in 1993. Like I said, with us gone, there are only five remaining. When we talk about our ability to deliver babies across Canada or serve the needs of vulnerable populations, it depends on building that workforce. We have a lot of apprenticeship within the degree—two and a half of the four years are spent in clinical practice—and we're one-on-one apprenticing with a midwife to learn our skills through a lot of that time.
The growth of this profession is in the sustained support we need in order to grow the midwifery workforce and to be able to then grow the percentage of babies that midwives are able to deliver. I will comment that 85% of pregnancies are low risk. Reproductive health care in general could be delivered by midwives. In doing only 20%, there's a huge margin that we could be serving. As we know, more and more, family doctors are leaving maternity care or obstetrics, and midwives have been there in the last 28 years to fill that gap.