Finance Committee on Oct. 23rd, 2006

[Ken Birmingham]

Yes.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

—and that the Atlantic accord is something that all of Newfoundland supported, not just the offshore industries?

[Ken Birmingham]

If you look at a province and its ability to produce and get ahead, the oil and gas industry is obviously crucial. If you look at it as a resource that is going to deplete over a period of time, there is no doubt that in the short to medium term the province needs to derive the maximum benefits it can from the resources.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Okay.

[The Chair, Conservative, Brian Pallister]

Ten seconds.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Ten seconds? I agree.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Conservative, Brian Pallister]

Well said.

Dean Del Mastro, you have some time now, four minutes.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I wanted to go to Mr. Jong for a moment. The Barer-Stoddart report, commissioned in 1989 by the provincial Liberal government in Ontario, acted upon by the New Democratic Party, really kind of decimated health care, didn't it? It kind of concluded that if we wanted to save money in health care, the best way to do so is to have fewer doctors. Would you like to comment on that—how it had the opposite effect?

[Dr. Michael Jong]

That's right. In hindsight, we know that it was totally wrong. Now we have to try to correct that. The thing about correcting it is that we are correcting it throughout Canada, but we must not forget that in rural Canada we have half the number of doctors out there to accomplish it. We need to correct that in rural areas. We heard from Mr. Savage that in Amherst, in rural locations, people are not going back. We need to address that issue.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Dr. Dennis Furlong, a former Minister of Health and Wellness in New Brunswick, made the argument that there were 30,000 family physicians in Canada. If they all took 1,500 patients, which is kind of the average size of a family practice, we should be able to service 45 million people. But we don't have the right distribution and in fact may be putting a disincentive in the way of providing service. I have 22,000 people in my riding who don't have a family doctor.

How do we help this? I would fit into the category of a rural-urban community. We have a big problem. How do we address this?

[Dr. James Rourke]

It is a big problem. One of the things we need to do is make sure the family physicians who are in practice are provided the right kinds of supports, with a proper team, to help them in practice. This is particularly important in rural areas, where family doctors are in short supply.

Secondly, we need to make family medicine more attractive than it has been. It has lagged behind the other professions in terms of financial rewards and other supports over the past decade.

Thirdly, a lot of those 30,000 family physicians are doing a lot of different things. Many are working in emergency departments; many are providing chronic care; many are providing other kinds of medicine, like sports medicine. So they're not all providing a full range of family medicine. We need to return to encouraging family physicians to do the full scope of practice as well, particularly in rural areas. We're good at that, and we'd like to encourage more doctors to do that in order to take a load off the rest of the health care system.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Wiseman, I don't have a lot of time. You talked about a lack of production capacity here in the province as far as being able to slaughter cattle is concerned, and so forth. I'm just curious. Would you argue that Newfoundland can be competitive agriculturally with other parts of the country?

[Mervin Wiseman]

I'm not sure that at this stage we need to talk about being competitive. I think we need to talk about sustainability. If we have a province where we're feeding over $100 million worth of red meat product to our consumers, and we have to import that, then I think that speaks to what we're doing in rural Newfoundland and Labrador. I think there are much broader issues associated with that. So that's where I speak from.

I'm just amazed. I know there were some fairly local or regional issues around my presentation, but these issues are very broad in scope nationally. We really won't have a preoccupation with the problems of food to health, with the food benefits and the security of food, until we get up some morning, the way you got up this morning, and we look at our plate and say, “Hey, there's no food there” or “Maybe I'll be poisoned”. We will have that discussion one of these days.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Brian Pallister]

We must move on now to Mr. Pacetti.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you to our presenters. This is interesting.

Mr. Wiseman, I want to continue Mr. Del Mastro's line of questioning. You had a lot of points. I don't come from an agricultural community, so I'm very limited...but I think I do eat some of the products that you furnish. I think it's still important for us.

You stated that you don't export, you don't trade with other provinces, and you don't get to determine where you're going to distribute your products. Is that what I am to understand? That was one of the things that really hit me, that I couldn't understand.

[Mervin Wiseman]

Yes, that's correct. We have no basic infrastructure for food inspection facilities, for example, which is a federal arrangement through CFIA, that would allow us to move outside of the boundaries of the province and get into other provinces and into other countries. We don't have that capacity because of negative infrastructure.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

So what happens now? How do the products get delivered?

[Mervin Wiseman]

Well, we import. Even our federal institutions, our provincial institutions...if we want anything to do with red meat, whether it's pork or anything in the red meat sector, it's imported. So it's brought in from other parts of Canada, or these days, it's mostly brought in from Argentina, Brazil, and places like that. We can't export; we can only import.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

Would you have products to export?

[Mervin Wiseman]

Well,in the red meat sector, especially lamb is something that we can grow here. We had 100,000 breeding ewes at the turn of the century. Today, we have 6,000, because we can't export them, we can't get them into the supermarkets. That's just one small example.

As for our dairy industry, we have some of the largest dairy production facilities east of Montreal in this province. It shows that when we have the capabilities...and of course, with dairy we have supply management and more capability to nail this kind of infrastructure and meet the food safety standards. We are exporting now.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

So are you saying that nobody's producing lamb? If somebody were even to make an investment in a lamb farm—I'm not sure what the technical term would be—you wouldn't be able to export it or you wouldn't be able to do anything with that product?

[Mervin Wiseman]

No, we wouldn't be able to do it. So it's no good for an entrepreneur to look at it, and say, hey, I'm going to grow lamb in this province, or I'm going to grow pork in this province. We have two pork producers left in the province, because we do not have the basic infrastructure to do it; we do not have the financial wherewithal to build that infrastructure. In large part, it's a government program.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

Okay, I think that's a problem in some of the other provinces as well.

How about the basic fruit and vegetables?