Mr. Speaker, when I listen to the hon. members, especially from the government side, talk about health care, it seems that everybody is waiting for a report to come in so they can do something. We are talking about Romanow. We have just seen the report from the Senate. It might be very interesting to compare both, I suggest to the hon. member, to see which is the better one, especially if we factor in the cost of both reports. However, once we get both of them, what is government going to wait for then? Because it is not moving on dealing with the major health care problems in our country.
One of the major problems is the discrepancy in how we fund health care. Most of the funding, as the hon. member well knows, that goes to the provinces goes through the Canada health and social transfer payments on a per capita basis. I have said before here, and the more people that understand it the better chance we have of clarifying this discrepancy, that this works exceptionally well for provinces with populations that are expanding or increasing. It works in the reverse for provinces with populations that are declining. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, we only have one, and that is Newfoundland and Labrador. Instead of getting more money as health care costs increase, we get fewer dollars because the population is dropping. The people who leave the province are the young and healthy. The people who remain are the older people who require more health care costs. Consequently, we get fewer dollars and we have greater costs and a geography that is comparable to none in the country over which we have to deliver health care.
How does the member suggest that a province like Newfoundland can receive equal treatment from the federal agencies in relation to funding that would be able to provide the same level of service in such a province, and I know there are others of varying degrees, compared to just a blanket formula that rewards some and punishes others?