Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to approach this from our level as fellow parliamentarians. I'm going to break it down into buckets.
The first bucket is how we fund, because when you fund health care, you fund defence, which is key. That is why it's in my first recommendation. People may say, you know, $10 million here and $10 million there, it doesn't matter.... It matters a lot. My first recommendation is very much the biggest budget chunk. It's how we provide health care and how we purchase from the civilian sector, and I use the term “purchase” very deliberately.
My first recommendation is that, as part of the intergovernmental arrangements with provinces, federal health care very specifically is in there and is negotiated along with the transfer taxes, because the federal government delivers health care as well as pays for it. That is my first recommendation.
The second one that comes out of there—I'll pull up my little sheets here because of my age—is that we're looking at things such as an urgent replacement funding-wise to replace the health records that Mr. Booth very clearly talked about. We have a Frankenstein system that was one of the first medical health records in Canada and needs replacing. There are no more bolt-ons capable.
It is a patient safety issue to not invest about a half a billion dollars in replacing this electronic system. If we do this now—because process takes time—from an information passage you will be able to address everything from patient safety for serving members no matter where they serve to then moving them through to transition so that there is a seamless transfer of records between the civilian sector and the military into Veterans Affairs. That is another recommendation I have.
I'm trying to go faster for you, Mr. Chair.
The other thing we're having a look at is investing in infrastructure. It is a challenge throughout the department. I'm going to look at CMED here, which one of our honourable members who is here can really appreciate. That's the central medical equipment depot in Petawawa. It is an ancient building. The pandemic has shown us that multidepartmental relationships for unique medical procurement storage require a national solution and investment. It's important, but we can't get it across the start line: Invest in infrastructure within health care.
Do I still have time, Mr. Chair? Okay. I can get through these. I promise.
The next area is health human resources. This is a pan-Canadian health care issue, and this is very timely. If I focus very tightly on the Canadian Armed Forces, we are in direct competition with other sectors and the Canadian public, not only to find people who wish to wear uniforms but also to find public servants or even contractors to do that. In order to make it a career of choice—we can deal with the military side in a minute—I strongly recommend that some impetus be put behind the public service to do a review of all the occupations within the public service that deliver direct clinical care to make sure that salaries and benefits are competitive. Please keep in mind that whether I be military, RCMP, CBSA—you name it—I probably don't serve in a major centre but in a small and remote area of Canada. We also need bilingualism.
The next area is to look at federal health capacity.
I'm sorry, Mr. Chair. I can get it all in here. I used to own the official languages portfolio.
For the federal health capacity, when it looks at everything from day care to health care, I think we need to think differently about it—which the Canadian Armed Forces can benefit from—by looking at a federal health system that looks something like the public health care system down in the U.S., where you have licensure and federally regulated care providers at a national level. They become tools of the federal level, beyond the provincial jurisdictions, to very closely target care, whether it be health care for the military and the RCMP, perhaps, or day care—things that have become the barriers we meet all along. We need to be very progressive in looking at federally regulated, certified and transferable.... This is what we need to have a look at to determine if there is a better way of doing business. I do believe there is some work ongoing in other departments.
That's all. Thank you.