Health committee  I think this is the same situation in the vast majority of countries; these are major decisions that are made by democratically elected bodies. The question becomes one of how much latitude you could create for public health officers, and I think there would probably be consensus

Health committee  I think it's not so much about the knowledge of vaccination and the vaccination protocol as the data flowing, in terms of surveillance of individuals post vaccination. There needs to be a pan-Canadian repository for this. The data needs to be collected on a consistent basis, pr

Health committee  Well, the first and most important is that health care is provincial jurisdiction. There's no such thing in the Constitution. It depends on the health care sector. Hospitals are provincial jurisdiction; public health is shared jurisdiction. The federal government actually has, ba

Health committee  I would say that it can be invoked, but the question then becomes one of how effective that would be. If you look at existing legislation like the Canada Health Act, which was referred to earlier, that would be a way of setting national standards, and if that wasn't powerful eno

Health committee  Well, we already talked about the Canada Health Act. That's one possibility, so there are alternatives. However, even if the Emergencies Act is a viable alternative from a legal perspective, I pointed out what are more than political difficulties. These are administrative and fin

Health committee  Thank you very much. In addition to my academic appointment, I'm also director of the North American Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, which has a mandate for Canada, the United States and Mexico but is based out of Toronto. In the 1990s, I served as deputy minister of

Health committee  For the catastrophic coverage.

Health committee  I put that forward as an option because it's not generally thought of as an option in this country because of our history. I wanted to fully explore the advantages and disadvantages of that option, and to deal with some of the difficulties we've had with block funding over the la

Health committee  I'd be happy to submit something on both option one and option two if the committee desires.

Health committee  The first thing is that in a multi-payer, fragmented system of both public and private payers, you have very different rules of access everywhere. They're by jurisdiction and they're by individual, depending on where that individual sits. Is that person on social assistance? What

Health committee  There are really two questions here. The first is on rural and remote coverage, and I'll come back on your second question to ask you for clarification, but really, nothing much has changed on the rural and remote. Of course, we're talking mainly about coverage here, as opposed

Health committee  I will speed up. The end result was that it was supposed to be 25% of medicare expenditures. Well, it's 25% of all provincial health care expenditures, so if the federal government were to take pharmacare out, it would be a very significant saving. The Canada health transfer or

Health committee  You're correct, in that, of course, there are a number of private plans. That said, it's important to keep in mind that the public sector, for various historical reasons, has more of the so-called private plans than even the private sector. What we're talking about is that on the

Health committee  As Mr. Romanow pointed out, I am going to focus my remarks on two options. Both can achieve the job, but they each have very different trade-offs in terms of their relative strengths and advantages and their disadvantages. The first is the traditional program that is financed in