Madam Speaker, I would like to begin by saying that it is timely that we have the opportunity to debate the social union. A lot is happening. There is the Saskatoon consensus of the premiers. There are ongoing discussions between parties in this House with respect to how we might come together, particularly the opposition parties if it is possible to arrive at a working position that we can advance together.
We are all reacting to a reality that has been imposed on the Canadian public by the Liberal government. That is the massive cuts to federal transfer payments to health and post-secondary education which came in the form of the creation of the Canada health and social transfer, the cover under which the federal Liberals moved to do what they said they would never do and that is to massively undermine medicare.
This is a great irony in the sense that the Liberals often want to take credit for the creation of medicare. They do not tell us that they first promised it in their platform of 1919 and did not deliver it until 1966 when they were in a minority parliament under pressure from the NDP. It took them that long to bring medicare into being. It has only taken them a couple of years in government, five years, since 1993, to almost completely destroy medicare and create conditions in which the provinces now come together to advocate a radically different way of dealing with health care in this country with respect to the establishment of national standards.
Even though one is disinclined both individually and as a party toward this kind of so-called decentralization, one almost has to agree with them. As another member said, there is no moral high ground left on that side of the House when it comes to the federal authority to regulate health care. They have completely abandoned their share of financing our health care system. Yet they parade around like they are the great saviours of medicare and like they have the moral high ground when it comes to health care. They have no moral high ground at all. They are in the gutter when it comes to this.
They are the ones, contrary to everything they ever promised, contrary to everything they ever said, who have become the architects of medicare's demise if the country, other political parties, the provinces and all of us together cannot act in some way to wake up these people as to what is happening in our hospitals.
Across the country people are not getting the kinds of services they need. People are having to wait longer for surgery and for diagnostic services. There are all kinds of horror stories, anecdotal but nevertheless persuasive and convincing, because the federal government is not exactly funding a study to see how its cuts have affected health care and post-secondary education.
We certainly agree with that element of the motion which condemns the government for its cutbacks in transfer payments to the provinces. We condemn the Prime Minister for rejecting out of hand the work the premiers have done. He does not have to agree completely with the premiers, but he does not have to be so cryptic and so dismissive.
He could say yes, very interesting; some good ideas there; let us have a look at them. Instead we get the same kind of arrogance from across the way that we see with respect to APEC and numerous other examples that the Prime Minister has provided for us in recent years.
The motion also talks about support from a majority of provinces before new federal initiatives are introduced in areas of provincial jurisdiction. This is very general language. I have to say I am not completely comfortable with it in the sense that we would not have had medicare if we had to wait for a majority of provinces to agree because a majority of provinces did not agree.
I am very leery about this kind of language. I would like to know more about what it means before I would certainly agree either personally or on behalf of my party and caucus as the intergovernmental affairs critic. I will read from the motion:
the right for a province to opt out, with full compensation, of a new or modified Canada-wide federal government social program in areas of provincial jurisdiction when the province offers a program or introduces an initiative in the same field.
My concern is that this actually goes beyond Meech and beyond Charlottetown because it says “new or modified”. In Meech and Charlottetown it talked about new programs. My concern is about the introduction of the word “modified” Canada wide program. It seems to me that some people might want to argue that if any changes were made to the Canada Health Act or to medicare this would be a modified program and that this might create the conditions under which some provinces could argue that they would be able to opt out of medicare. I would certainly be against that. I am sure all my colleagues share my concerns about that.
There is some tricky language here. I am not sure exactly what it means, but it certainly goes beyond other proposals which have created a lot of concern in the country in the past. I think this language, new or modified programs, would certainly create those concerns again and perhaps in an even more significant way.
I am not surprised that my colleague from the Reform Party does not seem to be as worried about the language as I am. Frankly I think they would like to see medicare broken up into 10 different systems with very little, if any, national participation whatsoever. The motion continues:
new co-operation mechanisms in order to avoid conflicts or settle them equitably.
We would have been much happier with this aspect of the motion if it had intimated or, even better, said that we are talking about new ways to set and to enforce national standards.
Given the total lack of moral high ground on the other side and given the diminishing participation of the federal government, I would agree that there may be a case now for the provinces having more say, in conjunction with the federal government, in mutually defining what national standards would be when it came to health care, when it came to medicare, and how those are to be enforced. However that is not what this says. It may be that the hon. member for Témiscamingue was being deliberately general in this in order to have a more broadly based discussion. If that is the case then that was an admirable goal, but if it was a deliberate attempt not to talk about national standards then this would be a matter of concern for us.
As someone who has argued in the past for the ability of the federal government to set standards, to enforce the five principles of medicare and to punish provinces for not adhering to them, I find it very difficult in this context, not in theory, to continue to defend that position when the Liberals have cut so much from federal contributions to health care. It becomes a weaker and weaker argument every time they do that, and I regret that very much. I wish they regretted it and I wish they would put more money back into health care, recover the high ground and be able to say with some confidence and some authority that they want to have a strong voice in the setting of national standards.
Another concern that needs to be expressed in any debate about the social union is the ongoing concerns of the aboriginal community with respect to how the development of any social union might impinge upon its relationship with the federal government which it sees as having, and rightly so, a fiduciary responsibility or relationship that it feels would be undermined by a social union which did not take account of that in some particular way. I see nothing in the motion that reflects that particular concern either.
For all these reasons I think the debate should continue about the social union. I think there is opportunity here for Canadians to work together. The premiers have already demonstrated this. The opposition parties are working together on this to some degree. I think it is time for the federal government to realistically engage in this debate instead of just posturing as the great defenders of medicare and acting as if the rest of us are all just beyond the pale.
It is not so. These people are culpable in many respects for the current situation. They need to face up to that reality and to deal with all Canadians in answering the question of how we can improve our health care system and how we can maintain it in such a way that Canadians have access to the same quality of service no matter where they live in the country.