Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I will, 100%. Absolutely.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes. I'm thrilled if you're thinking in that direction, for sure. We promote a model of holistic health and well-being. That is our model of care. We have a lot of integrated services already, so wherever we can integrate, we do. I know one of the previous speakers asked a quest

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Absolutely. We actually pay them on a payroll. We view them as part of and in alignment with primary care. We hold them as valued as your doctors, nurses and NPs. That's where we hold ours. Similar to.... I'm sorry, I'm missing the name of the previous speaker. We also fund our

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, there are some who do that as well. Again, it depends a lot of the times on the complexity. I can speak to that personally. I have a husband who has to be here in the GTA because of the complexity of the health care services we need. I'm originally from northern Ontario, an

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, the answer is yes.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Sure. I just found the translation, so hopefully I caught it all. If I understand correctly, you were asking whether people leave their communities because of their treatment. The answer is yes. Some people do have to leave their community when it comes to treatment. You mentio

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, absolutely. I can give you some concrete examples of our network here in Ontario with the Indigenous Primary Health Care Council. At our health care council, we are actually status-blind when it comes to providing service to indigenous peoples: first nations, Métis and Inuit

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes. It's huge. We've seen a massive increase in the use of our traditional healing and medicines program, especially during times of COVID-19, where we had more increases in mental health concerns, people who had never experienced anxiety or depression before—all of those thing

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, and that's why we mentioned that many of them end up instead of in preventative stages—if we're looking upstream versus downstream—now entering into emergency where it's then more costly for the system to service them later on.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Some are. It just depends on the location. We still have severe challenges. One of the recommendations we had also ties to not having.... We still have a major digital divide, especially for many of our remote first nations communities, so that becomes an ongoing challenge with t

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, and wait times.... If paperwork gets lost, the pre-approval process, then, is impacted. If you secure an appointment time and that paperwork is not done in time, that delays your travel, whether it be a flight, booking accommodations or whatever. It just trickles down and de

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Absolutely.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We have to find a better way around the paperwork system and the number of all of these pre-approvals, and then their having to take paperwork with them to prove they were at the appointment. It's not only leading up to the appointment. It's once you get to the appointment and th

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, it's much appreciated. We can speak from our Ontario perspective here for the communities that we service here. We're hearing that a lot of the resistance we have from current providers who are already registered or may have expressed an interest is because of the amount of

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes. The final one I will focus on is racism in the health care system. Racism in the health care system is deeply rooted since the time of Indian hospitals, when they were created in the 1930s. Indigenous people experienced inequitable access to health care services and receive