Public Accounts committee  That's a good question. Thank you. We are currently implementing a strategy. At Health Canada, we are working with the communities. The idea is not that —you have to solve it yourself. Environmental and public health officers from Health Canada have a responsibility to educate

Public Accounts committee  I can start by giving you what Health Canada has done. In partnership with Aboriginal Affairs, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, and the Assembly of First Nations, we did the bureaucratic thing. We set up a committee that developed a fairly comprehensive strategy to addre

Public Accounts committee  I am Shelagh Jane Woods, director general, primary health care and public health, First Nations and Inuit Health Branch, Health Canada.

Health committee  To answer directly, we have not stopped funding CHRs. We provide funding to the bands. The CHRs are not employed by us, but by the first nations directly. There are over 600 of them. There's tremendous variation in the roles they play and the things they do. They are associated u

Health committee  As far as I know, we have two years of funding and we are accustomed to working under these constraints. We might like a lot of our initiatives to be longer term, but the work goes on. As I said earlier, we did have a small initiative, the Indian and Inuit health careers progra

Health committee  No, that's not an issue I understand at all. I'm sorry.

Health committee  Mr. Dufour, all I can tell you is that a great deal of money has been allocated to support medical students. To date, over 60 people are receiving funds from us. That is our first initiative to support doctors and increase those numbers.

Health committee  Let me start with the last part and, as always, I'll turn it over to Debra for specific details. Let me say that none of these things are surprises to us. We have been working all these issues all the way through and, as I said earlier, even before we had the aboriginal health h

Health committee  What I would say is that we're a small part of this. We're the aboriginal health human resources initiative, but we are also members of the advisory committee on health delivery and human resources. I would add to what Dr. Tepper said by saying that we feel there's really good

Health committee  I think we are. I'll ask Debra Gillis to give you some more of the detail, but I would say in opening that it's one of the things that we turned our minds to very early. In fact, it's something that bedevilled us for many years when we had our small Indian and Inuit health care

Health committee  Okay. Thank you for those questions. That's a lot to cover. Let me start with the last one. The additional $3 million last year was money that we scraped together. A lot of it went to outbreak control in Manitoba, but it was spread more broadly than that. I think that accounted

Health committee  Yes, I think eventually you're going to want to talk to people from the Department of Indian Affairs. You'll remember that in the budget there was a lot more money for housing. We're really hopeful that there will be.... As I said at the beginning, there is a greater understandin

Health committee  Are those your questions? Yes, I agree that the elements are the same in all the determinants of health. I am not sure that we are spending less. That was a—

Health committee  Yes, and it was exactly why I was taking notes. It interests me a good deal and I am probably going to work on it with my colleague Dr. Barker. There are a lot of things that have to go into the renewal of our strategy. With every one of the elements you touched on, we have to

Health committee  That is exactly why I was so interested. I am of the same opinion: it would be very useful to have them, but we have to develop them together. Because, for sure it's not up to the first nations and Inuit health branch to try to do this by ourselves. We must work with our partner