Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Yes.

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Aboriginal people, for instance, have difficulty getting access to the services they need. So particularly at our organization, we're expanding in that area. There are disease groups such as those with HIV. We have the potential to expand in that area to help prevent and manage H

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  There are two other points to that. One, our physicians are salaried, so they don't have to worry about generating enough volume of business to make sure they have an adequate income. The second piece is that most doctors want to deliver services to their clients, and the busin

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  But the federal government has provided funds for the development of cooperatives. It has channeled them to the Canadian Co-operative Association and then down to the provincial level. That's been an advantage for young cooperatives to get access to funds to develop business plan

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  The other part of this is that provincial governments, which have the mandate for health care, have been forming health regions or health districts and have a tendency to want to own, operate, and deliver their own health services.

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Not at the federal level. It's mostly at the provincial level that it's challenging to get to support, because it is the provinces that have the mandate to deliver health-care services. In fact, the federal government has less and less of a role, as you can see in the Globe and M

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  I can give you an example related to diabetes. In our organization, we assess an individual's risk factors for diabetes. If in your regular contact with your doctor you start to ring bells for risk factors related to blood sugar, activity level, and these kinds of things, and it

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  We'd have to contact the federations and other...in Quebec, for instance, to see if they'd be willing to give us examples of the contract that, say, their paramedic services or the home care services have with the provincial government. We can't necessarily say that they would pr

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  We serve 35,000 people, and 10,000 people choose to be members of our organization in order to support it.

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  All they gain is a little advantage on the cost of pharmaceuticals if they purchase drugs from us.

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  I was going to put that away, actually.

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  There's a tremendous amount to learn about how to provide health care from the Japanese experience at serving people who are underserved. For instance, cooperatives in Japan started because people in the fisheries industry didn't have access to health care service delivery and th

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Thank you for the opportunity to present to you. We're representing the Saskatchewan Community Health Co-operative Federation. We're a federation of Saskatchewan's four cooperative community health centres. The community health centres are not-for-profit, citizen-owned health c