Thank you.
I think we've all agreed that one clear deficiency that COVID-19 has exposed is the dangerous shortage of capacity in our health care system that I think, Minister, you've acknowledged happened even before COVID. Some key figures have been pointed out and illustrate this situation. Canada has 1.95 acute care hospital beds per 1,000 people, fewer than every OECD country except Mexico. Our hospital beds have dropped from 6.9 per 1,000 people in 1976 to 2.5 today. We are 26th out of 28 OECD countries in doctors per 1,000 people. Among comparable developed countries, we rank 10th out of 10 for wait times for surgeries.
Minister, you recently called our health care system “fragile” and acknowledged that it is “stretched too thin”. Given that the federal share of health care funding in Canada has dropped from its original 50% down to about 22% today, will you commit, in the upcoming budget, to a significant increase in federal funding through the Canada health transfer?