Mr. Speaker, the hon. member needs to understand the difference between health research and medical research. What is very clear is that medical research in the old biomedical model was not satisfying all our needs in understanding all the determinants of health.
The Social Science Research Council was doing the work on poverty, violence and the environment. The Medical Research Council was merely looking at biomedical kinds of research.
It is imperative as we move forward that we have an integrated way of looking at all these issues because we know that poor people do not live as long. What are we to do to sort that out and figure out what we can do about it?
The National Forum on Health was very clear about the social determinants of health and how we have to move in these trends from hospital to community care, from doctor to multidisciplinary and to patient as a full partner in care, and from traditional to complementary medicine.
There was no place in the old Medical Research Council for these kinds of questions to be answered and they are the questions that Canadians want answered. We now have a solution as to how to do that without compromising the extraordinarily important biomedical research that needs to be done. In so many issues we just really want a cure.