It is absolutely amazing. This was a promise in the health care accord. There is no one in the land, no prime minister and no one from any party who could be a prime minister, who would have gone into another election without giving that $2 billion.
It is absolute nonsense for the government tried to trump it up and play a sleight of hand on this again, re-announcing and re-announcing the $2 billion. This was $2 billion as one-off money. Actually it was not one-off. It had already been announced in the health accord last year. I would challenge this government not to do this with health care dollars with the provinces. No wonder they are so upset about the dollars and cents in health care.
The budget says that $34.8 billion will go into health care over the next five-year period. However, we have to understand, which the provinces do full well, that those dollars were re-announced and re-announced. A good part of that money was announced in the 2000 budget, just before an election. That was playing politics with health. That was a five-year commitment, and we are just into the third year now. Now the government is re-announcing that $2 billion as part that $34.8 billion.
When the provinces look at the federal government and its lack of commitment to health care, they say that it may be able to fool the guy on the street, but it is not fooling them. They know the dollars and they know the numbers. They say that the government is absolutely false in what it says because its fifty-fifty commitment to health care is no longer there, and it is still not there. Stable funding is still not in place for this government.
Nonetheless, we can argue about whether the commitment is there. Last February an agreement was reached with the provinces. For the first time in a decade, provincial governments and the federal government came together and decided on a five-year agreement. Even in with that agreement, the government did not fulfil its commitment. Significant time lines were in the agreement, significant things that had to be done in that first year.
We agreed with a lot of what was in the accord. It said that provincial governments would be given flexibility to deliver on health care; it would reform the primary system. By September it would have the primary system indicators to tell us how we were doing, good, bad or indifferent, with regard to health care. The government has totally missed that deadline. It is not there today. It is not even being worked on. When the ministers met with the Prime Minister, just before the throne speech, there was not a word of that. Not only that, the bottom line indicators for a national home care program, which is part of the accord as well, were not there as well.
Therefore, we have a tremendous disconnect with what was agreed to by both orders of government last year to what has been happening and nobody is talking about it. It was not talked about in the throne speech. It was not talked about in this budget. In fact health care was scarcely mentioned in this budget.
What was talked about in this budget was what would be done with the public health agency.
It has been almost a year since we had the massive outbreak of SARS. SARS taught us some lessons, but the lessons should have been learned long before SARS hit. There were many warnings over the last number of years about the problem we would have if we did not look after the public health and protection of our nation. Diseases such as SARS, the avian flu and so on have ravaged many countries. Now we have firsthand experience of that, and we had been told it would come.
In fact we have been totally vulnerable from learning the lessons of SARS and actually dealing with it. We still do not have a chief public medical officer of health, somebody who can take the bull by the horns and play quarterback on a massive outbreak like SARS. That is really the job of the health minister, but if the minister will do not it, then we need somebody else who will. We are still sitting vulnerable on that. We still do not have a public health agency. Although it was mentioned in the budget, there have been no time lines for either one of those.
It is frustrating to see exactly what is in the budget and what is not. Why do we have to delay and delay? In fact the big discussion on the agency is the location of its headquarters, which is really interesting. It should either be in Vancouver or in Winnipeg, but my guess is it will be in Ottawa, not because of anything other than politics. It is unfortunate when we see governments playing politics with health care because it is too important.
We absolutely cannot be playing the politics of putting health care on a sustainable path and waiting until this summer to do it. The Prime Minister has had a decade of waiting for his time to become the prime minister. The answers for health care should have been foremost in his mind. It certainly is top in the minds of ordinary Canadians. Instead of coming forward in his first budget and first throne speech and giving real answers to health care, they have been absolutely ignored. It is a shame and an absolute disaster.
The government has tried to play sleight of hand with money. It has tried to convince people that it is fiscally prudent, yet there has been scandal after scandal. This government has to be replaced. The corruption goes from the top to the bottom. There is only one answer. Canadians will judge the government accordingly in the next election.