Thank you very much.
I'll try to stay within the five minutes. I know you'll keep me to that, but don't start the clock yet.
It's started. Okay.
On behalf of the three million members of the Canadian Labour Congress and their families, I want to thank the committee members for this opportunity to appear today.
In 2004, when the first ministers committed to the 10-year plan to strengthen health care, they recognized the importance of ensuring that Canadians have access to the care they need when they need it. The commitment was made that governments across the country would improve access to care and reduce wait times. They said it was imperative to increase the supply of health care workers and that strategic investments had to be made in community-based services, including home care, a pharmaceutical strategy, and health promotion. They affirmed the principles of the Canada Health Act. They said that timely access to health care should be based on need, not ability to pay, and that all levels of government would work together to meet the needs of Canadians.
Over the past few years, we have seen these commitments cast in terms of the interests of the private health industry. The opponents of medicare are on a major offensive against public health insurance and delivery, and governments are too readily entertaining the argument that privatization equals sustainability. Already, some governments are introducing competitive markets for health care, which is, by definition, damaging to primary care reform and to the seamless delivery of health care between the acute, intermediate, and long-term dimensions of the system.
If the provinces and territories follow Quebec's example, we will have private insurance, two-tier care, and doctors working in both the public and private systems.
Increasingly, governments allow private clinics to take the easiest and most easily billed surgeries from hospitals, so those clinics are operating, for all intents and purposes, as for-profit hospitals.
We object to the way in which employers encourage private clinics to grow by compelling injured workers to receive their surgeries in for-profit clinics. We want to say most emphatically that in no way is this a best practice to be advanced as a broader wait time strategy for medicare.
Due to an exclusion from the Canada Health Act, the federal government is also playing a role in permitting our public workers' compensation systems to be used to create markets for the private delivery of acute care and rehabilitation.
Provincial governments are choosing public-private partnerships for hospitals despite clear evidence that this is the most costly alternative. This course of action is advanced by the federal government, which established a massive new program to promote public-private partnerships.
The privatization of health care services has already resulted in the loss of jobs, inadequate wages and benefits, and reduced community control of our public health care system. Women health care workers, aboriginal women, and immigrant women especially feel the brunt of this degradation of work. Medicare is under threat from privatization, and the attacks are becoming increasingly targeted.
We indeed need sustained action on a national health human resources strategy to address critical shortages of all health care sector workers. As well as focusing on resources for training, we need governments to review what is happening to the quality of health care work. If the quality of work continues to decline, workers will not enter or stay in the health care field.
The government must not meet our health human resources needs by relying on a strategy that encourages internationally trained health care workers to come to Canada only to endure low pay, poor working conditions, and less than full citizenship rights. Immigrant workers deserve to be respected. The federal government must work with provinces to ensure that credential recognition is dealt with in a way that respects the internationally trained workers and contributes to strengthened public health care access across the country. We have to look at the role of Canada as a poaching nation, given that there is no investment in developing countries in their health care systems and health care education.
Furthermore, we would ask members of this committee to call on the government for real action on a national pharmacare plan. The CLC urges members to reflect on the spiralling costs of pharmaceuticals and the pressure this is placing on our health care system. We need a universal, publicly funded, and publicly administered insurance plan to cover prescription drugs. We're not looking only at catastrophic coverage, because that's not able to control the rising costs of pharmaceuticals, which are undermining public health care.
Since the 10-year plan was announced, the CLC continues to hear from our affiliates that medicare is still Canada's most important social program.