Thank you, Madam Chair.
We're talking about health care a great deal. Since I manage my own time, I will take the liberty of making a comment, and it's important that the witnesses hear it.
I served on the Standing Committee on Health for over a year and a half. I just looked through the notices of meeting to see which medical associations and health professionals we had called to appear.
In a matter of seconds, I found emergency physicians, psychiatrists, family doctors, nephrologists, cardiologists, ophthalmologists, surgeons, orthopedists, people advocating for regional and rural interests, gastroenterologists, pulmonologists, dentists, osteopaths, homeopaths—obviously, whatever one may think of them—people who wanted Ottawa to invest in infrastructure, nursing associations that felt they were being treated unfairly by doctors, massage therapists who want to be recognized, psychotherapists who want tax breaks and physiotherapists.
All of this at a time when the provinces are struggling with health care, and the population is aging. These groups—and you are part of them—were all asking for one thing: They were asking the federal government to impose specific conditions on transfers to the provinces so that their priorities and their groups would be given priority.
None of these groups that came to see us realized that, with this approach, they were harming the medical profession as a whole.
Health care is important. I’m the first to admit it. I am a chronically ill patient who needs to see my specialist often and who spends a lot of time in a chair getting injections. I know it’s important.
In this context where everyone is looking out for their own interests, demanding conditions for mental health and the sciences—all of which are important professions—how is it that, in your briefs and opening remarks, no group is asking the federal government to increase its unconditional health transfers so that these transfers keep pace with the costs associated with the system? How is it that this is not mentioned?
It's an open question.