Thank you very much.
I want to thank the minister for coming today. I'm going to ask the minister a series of questions. I'm looking for short answers because I have quite a few questions I want to ask you.
With regard to innovation, I notice that the CIHR has been cut. It's a decrease of $4.5 million from the estimates to date in 2014-15 and knowing that the Naylor report on innovation is coming out, how would the CIHR deal with this if you don't increase the budget for CIHR to fund further research into innovation of the health care system?
The second piece is that we know that currently the agencies that are doing research are having to find a fairly large amount of money, $8.5 million, for these groups that don't have anywhere to raise the money to be able to do that little transition for three months each year for the last two years. This cut means they're going to have to.... Nobody knows what they're going to do because there's no way to be able to get that transition money from CIHR, because CIHR is going to have to be cutting certain things. That's about CIHR.
I also wondered why.... For instance, we looked at the fact that the budget for first nations and Inuit primary health care has been cut by a fairly large amount, $45 million, from 2014-15, and $59 million.... That's going to leave us with a real shortfall at a time when we see that the Auditor General has been talking about the quality of care and outcomes and the number of nurses and the ability to deliver care in the north and to Inuit and first nations populations.
We see the increase in infectious diseases, in obesity, in type 2 diabetes. We see rickets in the north, which I only learned about in medical school as a historical fact. Nobody has seen rickets here for, I don't know, almost a century, and we're seeing this in the north. The nutrition is no longer good. We're seeing overcrowding. We're watching tuberculosis increasing. We're watching this kind of falling happening, and I know the minister will say that this cut has come about because of the sunsetting of the water and waste water action plan.
Since February of this year we've had 139 drinking water advisories in first nations communities, so the water isn't safe and it's getting worse. In three months we've had 139 advisories. Why are we cutting such essential programs for a group of Canadians who have the worst health outcomes in the world as seen in the last UNICEF report that was done here?
There is one last piece I wanted to ask you about as well because I think that's all I'll fit, so I'm putting these three on the table. One of them has to do with the CFIA. It's receiving $107 million less than it did in 2013-14. We're also seeing that there is a plan in your planning and priorities for 2015-16 for 271 full-time employees to be eliminated for the meat and poultry subprogram of the food safety enhancement program.
We also know that we're hearing about E. coli in beef and we want to know how many meat inspectors were employed in 2013, 2014, and 2015. Were any positions left unfilled? Have the number and frequency of inspections been cut back at any plant, and if so, which plant and why? How many times a year are general sanitation inspections done at ready-to-eat food plants, like Maple Leaf Foods or raw food plants, such as beef and poultry, etc.
Why would there be a cut in something that is so essential and which has had really bad outcomes for the last three years?
The minister said in the House that she would get inspectors to inspect inspectors because of the bad results that have been happening. What is the quality and the level of the training of the inspectors there? Do they have any requirements for their training if they allow such huge problems to occur?
I'm going to leave those three questions on the table and I'm hoping to get every piece of them answered. That's why I was so specific.