Evidence of meeting #83 for Health in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was well.
A recording is available from Parliament.
5:20 p.m.
Liberal
John Oliver Liberal Oakville, ON
That's a problem for the Province of Nova Scotia to address. Why are wait times...?
As the health committee, are you going to shine the lens on your own province and say there's a problem with how you're delivering services? Is that what you want to do?
5:20 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bill Casey
I'm sure other provinces have better methods—that's all. My thought is that we could help the provinces who have a poor wait-time experience. We might be able to help it. That's just my thought.
Mr. Davies.
5:20 p.m.
NDP
Don Davies NDP Vancouver Kingsway, BC
I agree with John on this.
I mean it's interesting as an academic study. I think we could pull almost anything into our health jurisdiction that we wanted to. I mentioned at the last meeting that our member of the federal government identified wait times as part of the health accord when the Paul Martin government negotiated it, so clearly the federal government was interested in wait times at that time.
I suspect that with a general question to the Auditor General to look at wait times in provinces, you're going to come back with about 29 questions from the Auditor General. He's going to come here and say, “Wait times for what? What procedures are you talking about?” I think we're going to have give very detailed....
Maybe we have to pick three or five representative procedures. I think we should do a little more work on framing exactly what we want the Auditor General to look at, and do that work before we engage the Auditor General.
I don't think it's a bad thing to do, but I think we're going to need some particularity.
I'm looking at the time, Mr. Chair, and I know you want to talk about future business. Can I ask a question?
The minister is coming on Thursday. The minister usually stays for an hour, and I know that the staff stays after. Can we schedule maybe half an hour for committee business?
5:25 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bill Casey
We're out of time now. The wait-time issue is not a big deal for me. I would be interested if it were easy to do, but don't worry, I'm not—
5:25 p.m.
Liberal
John Oliver Liberal Oakville, ON
I was just going to add to that. I don't think it's a bad idea. It's just the blanketness of it and why we're doing it that bothers me a bit, but depending on what our next business is, there is the indigenous affairs study. We had also said we wanted to look at mental health services, at home care.
Maybe if we're doing a study in one of those areas, we could ask the Auditor General to do a provincial review of access and wait times in an area that we're studying versus just an out-of-the-blue study on wait times, which would be disconnected from....
5:25 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bill Casey
We are really out of time now and I do want to point out that I spoke to the chair of indigenous affairs and they did a study in 2016 on health emergencies in first nations. They did another study on suicides in 2017 and are planning on doing another study on indigenous health in 2018. I'll just leave that with you to think about until after we have the minister here. We'll do some committee business, but it sounds like they already have a history on indigenous health and it sounds like that's where they are going next year. If they're going to do it, I don't see how we could do it too.
Anyway, I'll leave that with you.
We'll reconvene on Thursday. We'll have the minister and then we'll do some committee business.
Thanks very much, everybody. I enjoyed your questions.
The committee is adjourned.