Mr. Speaker, beyond the nice rhetoric on Canada's health care system, the real purpose of this bill is to confirm and expand the self-proclaimed federal mandate in the health sector, a sector which clearly falls under provincial jurisdiction and which is clearly Quebec's responsibility.
I want to draw your attention to the amendments, the additions to that act. Paragraph 4(2)( a ) reads:
(2) Without restricting the generality of subsection (1), the Minister's powers, duties and functions relating to health include the following matters: a ) the promotion and preservation of the physical, mental and social well-being of the people of Canada;
Paragraph 4(2)( b ), which was not there before, reads: b ) the protection of the people of Canada against risks to health and the spreading of diseases;
We are talking about an expanded mandate regarding prevention. Incidentally, the former act included a section on the protection of the social well-being. That provision is no longer there. It has probably become a responsibility of the Minister for Human Resources Development, who will call it something else.
There is a federal will to take over the provinces' responsibilities-I will refer to Quebec throughout my speech; the other provinces can use a different approach if they wish-in fields which not only clearly fall under provincial jurisdiction-we will not discuss jurisdiction for the sake of jurisdiction-but in which only Quebec can work efficiently, because Quebec alone can implement an integrated policy.
As for amendment (b)
b) the protection of the people of Canada against risks and the spreading of diseases;
I find that this is evidence of incredible gall on the part of the government after the disaster-the word is not even strong enough-the horror of the tainted blood problem. There was a hue and a cry in that connection to identify those who were to blame for the tainted blood, and everybody seemed to be responsible except the department. And now this is the responsibility we want to broaden here to include risks to health.
Risks to health are so closely linked to general conditions of poverty, sanitation, access to healthy accommodation, education, life, organization of life that one wonders how, in what appears otherwise to be merely a technical bill, the department's mandate could be made that broad.
Either there is a need felt in the federal government, in Canada, to assign itself responsibilities it is not able to meet because they affect people, or there is an inability to admit that the exercise of those responsibilities falling strictly within federal jurisdiction has been a lamentable failure. And I am not referring only to the budget. I could also address transportation policies, communications policies, even, recently, international policies with the disgraceful events surrounding the visit of the Chinese Premier.
It is, nevertheless, dangerous to lead citizens to believe that one is responsible for preventing risks to health when, in reality, one does not and cannot have the means to do so. To really have the means would require taking over the provinces' place. So, far from putting an end to duplication and overlap, the bill is typical of the inefficiency that exists in areas where there is the most crying need at this time, when resources are increasingly scarce.
In reality, it is far more important to ask who is responsible than to ask who is competent, for this reaches people more directly. When talk is of competency, in reality the term that ought to be used is responsibility.
Quebec is the one with responsibility, but not with the means because, as the Minister of Health has pointed out, since 1982-83, eight billion dollars have been cut from health alone, money which represented firm commitments to supposedly allow establishment of the health and social services system in Quebec at a time when-not because money was any more plentiful in Ottawa than in Quebec-there was an extraordinary central concentration of tax dollars. The original reason for this had been financing the Second World War, and that concentration suited to a T all of the senior public servants and politicians who had worked to get decisions on economic and social policies centred in Ottawa, with the provinces only as subcontractors.
This policy was rejected unanimously in Quebec, by all parties. The money that was collected and is still being collected, something which Duplessis, yes Duplessis, tried to get around when he decided Quebec would have its own tax collection system, the federal government used this money so it could determine the direction, development and control of economic and social policies, instead of the Government of Quebec.
This bill confirms clearly and unreservedly the government's policy of overlap and duplication and the irresponsibility we saw in the tainted blood scandal, for instance.
The federal government takes credit for introducing the health care system, as though it would never have happened otherwise. I will not get into the history of this policy which, although its origins go back to Saskatchewan, became a Canadian policy. A respected author on the subject, Thomas Duperré, said in 1987
before the commission of inquiry on health and social services in Quebec that establishing federal programs merely shifted to the federal level a debate that had already started at the provincial level and would have led to the same results over the same period of time, give or take a few months or a few years.
Quebec Health Minister Jean Rochon is, as everyone knows, an expert on these issues. He was involved in the work of the Castonguay-Neveu Commission and later chaired the commission that started its sittings in 1985 and developed the policies of both the previous and present government. So this is not a partisan position, anything but. According to Mr. Rochon, the Canadian health system is a myth. The truth is, we had developed a health and social services system, despite the fact that the federal government centralized its control over resources while ignoring exclusive provincial jurisdiction in this area as conferred under the constitution of the Canadian confederation.
The minister went on to quote the Quebec Minister of Social Affairs and Welfare René Lévesque. At the federal-provincial conference on poverty in 1965, Lévesque, federalist minister in a Liberal government in Quebec, said that it had become imperative to establish a genuine economic and social policy. This policy should be integrated, flexible in its mechanisms and include a social security system centred on the family and based on the right to assistance on the basis of need.
The same sentence, with few changes, could be used to express the same urgency voiced by sovereignists quite recently.Mr. Lévesque went on to say that for the sake of efficiency and on constitutional grounds, the Quebec government alone could and should, within its own territory, design and implement such a policy. Quebec could not let the Government of Canada assume this responsibility. Quebec did not, however, exclude interprovincial co-operation and mutual consultation.
He also said that the social and economic development policy they had formulated would create an integrated social policy, regional development policy, manpower policy, health policy, housing policy and job training policy.
Fourth, the federalist minister said that the general policy, while he did not necessarily condemn it, did not necessarily correspond, in terms of its spirit and terms of application, to one the Government of Canada might opt for. The people of Quebec would enjoy at least as many if not more benefits than other Canadians might.
The central government's repeated interference, expanding into preventive medicine, is an affront to the intelligence of the history of the past 30 years. It is compromising, in a way-and here I am talking of Canada outside Quebec-and it compromises, it seems to me, a now necessary reorganization. Instead of decentralizing, the federal government is busy reaffirming ever more resoundingly its responsibility for all areas of economic and social development. Through cuts and the transfer of the deficit, it is, moreover, usurping the ability of the poorest provinces, at least, to replace them.
This is a historic moment in the history of Quebec and of Canada. It is not without some emotion that we view these bills-we will be debating Bill C-96 this afternoon or tomorrow and the human resources investment fund and unemployment in the days and weeks to come-that we note that the thinking behind all these bills is one of increasing centralization.
It is an approach, as the Canada social transfer demonstrated in the budget, whereby the only thing transferred to Quebec is the deficit. We are moved by the fact of having to say that the central government wants to take over protecting the public against health risks, when we know the extent to which poverty affects health significantly. We know that centralized and centralizing policies are not going to provide us in Quebec with the tools we need to fight unemployment, poverty and with poor health at the more disadvantaged levels of society.
We will continue to express the thoughts of the large majority of our fellow Quebecers. Even those who voted no, know that, through their municipal governments, their social groups and their Government of Quebec, closest to them, and the most effective integrator, they will not get to heaven, but at least they will have the assurance that every effort was made to provide equality for all in Quebec.