Thank you, Chair and committee members, for having me today.
My name is Chris Gallaway. I am the executive director at Friends of Medicare. We are based here in Alberta. We're a non-partisan advocacy organization and we've been around since 1979 working to improve, protect and strengthen public health care for Albertans and all Canadians.
With my time today, I want to touch on four issues briefly.
The first is finally moving forward on universal single-payer public pharmacare. The facts are out there: Canadians face some of the highest drug costs in the world. Millions of Canadians are struggling to afford their medications, including one in five households here in Alberta. A third of Alberta workers do not have drug coverage, and these numbers are only getting worse with the cost of living going up. We know there will be an initial cost to implementing this national program, but we also know there will be substantial savings—savings for Albertans, for employers, for our governments and for our health care systems. This is well documented in reports from the Parliamentary Budget Officer and others, and the road map to get there is already in front of you in the government's own report from Dr. Hoskins. This is the right thing to do for Canadians' health. It's the smart thing to do for our budget, and we urge you to get on with it in budget 2024.
The second issue I want to raise is around dental care. Here in Alberta over 30,000 kids got to see a dentist because of the Canada dental benefit. I know it's been life-changing for many families and children, and this happened in spite of the majority of our MPs from Alberta not supporting moving forward on dental care. At a time when the cost of living is the top concern, moving forward with dental care for children, for seniors, for folks with disabilities and for so many of those on fixed incomes has never been more crucial. We hope to see this expansion continued in budget 2024.
The third issue I want to raise today is around accountability for our public health care dollars. We see the federal government's role in health care as an important one—funding health care to ensure that we have a robust system in every province and jurisdiction—but when the new federal health transfers were being negotiated, Friends of Medicare and many other groups called for strings to be attached to that funding. Instead, we've seen blank cheques to provinces with no guarantee they even spend the money on health care, let alone that they don't use it to further privatization. In Alberta, we've already seen this as a concern with respect to our pandemic spending. Our auditor general looked at $4 billion in spending on the pandemic and concluded that the provincial government did not provide a clear picture of what was done with the money or what was achieved. We deserve accountability for our public health care dollars and we need to enforce the Canada Health Act in provinces where they are violating it.
The fourth issue I want to raise with you all today is around indigenous health. The health inequities we're seeing in indigenous people in this province are completely unacceptable. The federal government has a clear role in addressing this and stepping up as a meaningful partner. That means stepping up to address barriers to access, to address the backlog in health infrastructure in indigenous communities, to address the social determinants of health and to look at the systemic racism we're seeing in our health system and our programs.
That must include urgent action on the drug poisoning and mental health crises that we're seeing. This summer, Treaty 6 chiefs declared a state of emergency given the number of their people who were dying in this crisis. Five nations in northern Alberta have followed suit. The grand chief for Treaty 6 at the time was quoted as saying, “If harm reduction isn't available, our People will die.” There's an urgent need, and the federal government needs to be at that table.
There's so much more I could say on that: on the need to keep the promise on status for all and on regularization so that everyone can access health care, on enforceable long-term care standards, and on the need for a national staffing strategy in health care. There are many issues, but with my time today I will leave it at that. I look forward to the questions from committee members today.
Thank you.