Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today to speak for 40 minutes to Bill C-95, an act to establish the Department of Health and to amend and repeal certain acts.
In fact, the purpose of this bill is to shorten the name of the Department of Health and Welfare to Department of Health. Yet, in reading Bill C-95, we realize that some sections have been amended, repealed or added so that the government can, under the pretence of providing good government, give the Minister of Health the legitimate power to interfere once again in areas of exclusive provincial jurisdiction. We are faced, once again, with this overwhelming desire to centralize everything.
Since I like setting the record straight, I will give you a short history lesson.
As the type of political system that would prevail in the future Canadian union was being defined in 1867, it was easy to see the emergence of two opposite views of federal-provincial relations. On one side, John Macdonald wanted a strong central government that could devolve certain powers to the provinces as it saw fit. On the other side, Cartier definitely favoured a highly decentralized confederation. In French dictionaries, confederation is defined as the union of several sovereign states.
We know only too well what this led to. Powers were indeed distributed between the two levels of government, so that each would have exclusive jurisdiction over their own areas of responsibility.
But things are never as clear cut as they seem with the federal government. The government kept in its hand what it considered as a trump card, which proved to be harmful to federal-provincial relations: the power to spend and to make laws for the peace, order and good government of Canada.
This way, the federal government could still do as it pleased in any provincial area of responsibility, without paying attention to the distribution of powers guaranteed by the constitution. And this was definitely planned and hoped for. This is confirmed by Alexander Galt, one of the fathers of confederation, who stated that the distribution of powers, as described in the British North American Act of 1867, did not provide the provinces with enough funding to properly look after the areas falling under their jurisdiction. This means that the very document that gave rise to a new Canadian union provided that the provinces would not have sufficient funding and that the federal government should step in to compensate the members of this union.
Unable to have a highly centralized federal system from day one, John Macdonald made sure that its power to encroach would enable it to intervene in any jurisdiction it pleased and to impose its views on the provinces, even with respect to exclusive provincial jurisdictions.
It may be difficult for some to recognize that this is what those who drafted the British North America Act had in mind. It may be difficult for them to believe that what they like to refer to, wrongly I must say, as the most decentralized system in the world, already provided, in its embryonic state, an increasing centralization of power in favour of Ottawa.
Yet, the comments made by Alexander Galt, whom I quoted earlier, leave no doubt as to those initial intentions, and nor do the remarks made by another architect of the Act of 1867, who said that, in the long run, the provinces would become nothing more than large municipalities under the control of the federal government, on which they would greatly depend. We were not there at the time to see what was going on, but these people were, and they even wrote about it.
This is how the structure in which we still live, unfortunately, was developed and set up. I made reference to our history at the very beginning of my speech to show that, to this day, and contrary to what many would like us to believe, nothing has changed. This centralizing vision which gives greater power to the federal government is not mentioned in the speeches of today's key players on the federal scene, but it is obvious in their actions. The best example is certainly the health sector in general, where the federal has been interfering constantly and increasingly for decades. Bill C-95, which is now before us, is evidence of that.
Section 92.16 of the Constitution Act gives provinces jurisdiction over health related issues on their territory, by generally providing for all matters of a purely local or private nature within a province. Moreover, sections 92.7, 92.13 and 92.16 of the same act also give the provinces jurisdiction over hospitals, the medical profession and practice, as well as health related laws in general, on their territory.
We can say that this is an area of provincial jurisdiction since it involves ownership and civil rights.
In the light of what I just said, it is obvious that health care is an area which should come under provincial rather than federal jurisdiction. However, the federal government has been interfering in this area, in various ways, for several years now.
The Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Act, the Medical Care Act and, more recently, the famous Canada Health Act, which combines both previous acts and crystallizes so-called national standards, show how the federal government deals with areas of shared jurisdiction. Its initiatives aimed at increasing the
federal presence in these areas of exclusive provincial jurisdiction are being justified by its spending power, which creates problems not only in the health care area, but I will not have enough time to list the many disputes it has caused, others will do it for me, I am sure.
For my part, I will paint a picture showing what happens when a government is unwilling to admit that it cannot afford to do and decide everything on behalf of the provinces. This picture has as a backdrop the acute crisis the health care system is going through in Canada and Quebec.
The federal government's temptation or desire to interfere in the health care area is not new. In fact, right after the second world war the federal government took over all major fields of taxation to make sure it would receive almost all the taxes normally levied by the provinces.
At the end of the war, the government got a bright idea: instead of giving the taxing powers back to the provinces, it would redistribute the money through grants conditional on standards set by the federal government. That was an ingenious way to encroach even further upon areas not within the federal jurisdiction, at a time when the London Privy Council, the equivalent in those days of our Supreme Court, wanted to restrain the federal government's tendency to centralize. In the health area, the Established Programs Financing Act is a good example of what I said earlier: this government refuses to accept that it cannot do everything and be everywhere.
Created in 1977, the EPF program has kept the same structure ever since. However, the growth rate has not been as expected over the last ten years. That is what brought about the shortfall, as we call it, for the provinces and Quebec in the health area. In 1986, the federal government reduced the growth rate of transfers by 2 per cent. It was the beginning of a long series of payment cuts. In 1989, the indexing factor was again reduced by 1 per cent. In 1990, Bill C-69 froze transfers to the 1989-90 level for two years supposedly. In 1991, the government announced that the freeze would be maintained for three more years. During most of that blighted period for the health care system, the opposition cried its outrage. It said loud and clear that this process could only push the system to its own ruin.
But the same party, now in government, is weakening the system even further. Between 1977 and 1994, the federal contribution to health went from 45.9 per cent to 33.7 per cent, a drop of 10.6 per cent which Quebec and the provinces have had to absorb as best they could. Unfortunately, the mismanagement condemned not so long ago by the Minister of Labour and the Deputy Prime Minister seems to still be with us.
My predictions for 1997-98 are that the federal contribution will slide as low as 28.5 per cent of funding. Over the years, as Ottawa disengaged itself from health funding, Quebec alone was left $8 billion short. Eight billion dollars which the Government of
Quebec had to scramble to find elsewhere. To that figure can be added the projected cuts in the Canada social transfer of $308 million in 1995-96 and more than $587 million in 1997-98.
The leeway that was to be afforded by the Canada social transfer is in reality merely the opportunity for Quebec and the provinces to make their own choices as to where they would make the cuts to absorb this unilateral disengagement. This is how the present Liberal government sees decentralization. This is what it means by flexible federalism. No thanks, we are not interested.
As I have already said, articles 92.7 and 16 of the British North America Act allocate health and social services exclusively to the provinces. There is, however, also a federal health department.
Next year, the federal Department of Health will cost the taxpayers in excess of one billion dollars, a billion dollars wasted doing what the governments of Quebec and the provinces could very well do themselves.
Moreover, this superfluous department allocates sizeable amounts for programs and projects already in existence in Quebec. Let me give you some examples of these, Mr. Speaker: the strategy for the integration of persons with disabilities, the campaign against family violence, the new horizons program, the seniors secretariat, the tobacco strategy, the drug strategy, the AIDS strategy, the program on pregnancy and child development, the children's bureau-I could go on and on.
The federal cuts should have been in these areas of duplication, but it insists on having a finger in every pie, and the disastrous effect on public finances does not seem to be enough to convince it to accept reality.