Madam Chair, the member for Charleswood--St. James--Assiniboia has given me a lot to comment on, so let me try to go through it because I am sure my time is running out.
On the human resource strategy, we have known for a number of years that we have been facing serious shortages in a number of health care occupations, yet the pan-Canadian strategy that has been asked for and continues to be asked for by a coalition of health care practitioners still is not there and we are now in a serious shortage. Many people in Canada cannot get family physicians. We have a serious problem.
To roll into that, we have physicians living in Canada who have foreign credentials and cannot get their foreign credentials recognized in Canada. There is a broad range of issues around a human resource strategy and I would encourage the Liberals to take action now on this because we will be talking about this in four more years' time if this keeps up.
On the issue of face to face consultation, it is very interesting that we say it is acceptable for some people in remote communities in Canada to rely on telehealth. We already do it. We already have people in Canada who have nurse practitioners, and as the member rightly pointed out, in the north. We already have these practices in place in Canada. If they are good enough for Canadians, surely we can look at the very professional practices that we already have in place to manage these kinds of situations and deal with them in the Internet pharmacy context.
I think the last thing is the unintended consequences. I think we have covered that in terms of talking about the fact that we already have practices in place where people do not see physicians face to face. The member rightly pointed out his own experience in terms of how we already have people who have to manage without that face to face consultation.