Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I wanted to touch upon wait times, Minister. I really think there are some quiet success stories that we're seeing across the country. In anticipation of your visit, I asked my local hospital for some stats, because sometimes it's better to look at how a federal government policy is working through the lens of your local hospital.
I asked our local hospital what the 6% increase in federal transfers to the provinces means for the Royal Victoria Hospital in Barrie. They told me they were able to do 606 additional cancer, cataract, and joint replacement surgeries and that there were 1,080 additional MRI hours. They've been able to expand the MRI service from part-time to having the machines working 24 hours a day. That has allowed the wait times for an MRI at RVH to go from 54 weeks to 7 weeks in the last 16 months. I understand there are lots of success stories happening across the country because of the 6% increase in health care funding to the provinces.
I wanted to get you to touch upon what the positive synergies are in the health care system that are allowing the provinces to see this reduction in wait times and how you are shepherding it. If I look back to when the wait times increased, between 1993 and 2005 there were negative synergies, whether because of the cutbacks to the Canadian health transfers at that time by the Minister of Finance for the previous government, or because of the Premier of Ontario between 1990 and 1995, when he limited medical enrolment and capped doctors. We saw Ontario really struggle with filling those voids in hospitals and communities where they struggled to find doctors. Those were the negative synergies.
What positive synergies are you leading the charge on that have allowed this incredible turnaround to where we're actually seeing reductions in wait times, rather than the increases that were the mainstay of the previous government?