Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate today. I remind the House that this is the first major health bill to come before this parliament. I think many of us were anticipating this and looking forward to the debate. I want to remind the viewing public that we are debating an act to establish the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, what I will refer to as the CIHR, and to repeal the Medical Research Council Act.
The fact that this is the first major debate on a health bill before the House is significant. We have had many debates on health care in the last couple of years, but no bills of any significance have come before the House. I want to remind the House of some of the issues we have spoken about in regard to health care.
One of them, of course, was the hepatitis C issue, which the government completely mishandled. We went on for days and days seeking a fair, just and compassionate solution for all hepatitis C victims, and a generous solution on the part of government in terms of assistance to those victims. We fought and raged for days, but the government held its position. Today not one hepatitis C victim has received any support from the federal government. In fact, a huge number of them were left out of the package.
We also debated at length in the House the draconian cuts to health care, which goes back to the previous speech given by the NDP member. We are talking about a government which took $17 billion out of health care. I see you shaking your head, Mr. Speaker, but it is true. This year during the budget debate the government proclaimed that its budget was a health care budget, that it would return $11.5 billion of the $17 billion it took out. That will bring us back to the levels which existed 10 years ago.
The government does not have a lot to brag about. However, this bill is worthy of debate and it is worthy of support. I want to state very clearly from the beginning that I support it and the Progressive Conservative Party supports it. I think it is a very worthy initiative.
Because it is the House of Commons I guess we have to be a little political, but I want to mention some of the issues on which the government has swallowed itself whole from time to time. I will talk about the hypocrisy of government. One item I will talk about is the Drug Patent Act, which was brought into the House about 10 years ago when I was a member of parliament on the government side.
Mr. Speaker, do you remember that? You stood in the House and raged for hour after hour, condemning the government for bringing in the Drug Patent Act. I want to remind the public of that for one very good reason. The Drug Patent Act had a purpose behind it. It relates to the very bill we are talking about today. The bill that we are speaking about, of course, will bring research scientists together so that we will have a network of the scientific community sort of singing from the same song book, exchanging and sharing information, with some funding from the federal government.
The minister today mentioned the term brain drain. He said, and I agree with him, that this act will do something about the brain drain. That is what we had in mind when we brought in the Drug Patent Act in the early 1990s because what Canada was missing was a great deal of expertise in terms of scientific and medical research. Those people were leaving the country in big numbers and drug companies had no patent protection in this country in comparison to other industrialized countries in the world. We brought in legislation which provided them with that protection.
The argument of the day was, why would companies invest millions and possibly billions of dollars in research if someone else could steal their patent within a handful of years? It was a very deliberate attempt by our government of the day to bring in protection for the research community in this country and it has worked. This bill should go some distance in reinforcing that.
It will be remembered that the government promised to rescind or take away the Drug Patent Act, to change it dramatically. Obviously it has not done that because it would not be in its best interests. However, in opposition I suppose it was politically a pretty popular thing to say at the time and, of course, I have reminded you of some of the speeches you made, Mr. Speaker.
Taking office is something like a lynching in the morning. It sort of focuses the mind. That is exactly what happened when the Liberals took office in 1993. The government then decided that maybe this was not such a bad idea after all, and we still have it.
The government has tagged on to some of the initiatives we took in the past. Being totally honest, some of them were not very popular and some of them are still debatable. However, some of them were worth embracing and certainly the present government has done that, and I commend it for doing so. The government has gone one step beyond adopting what previous governments have done in actually grabbing and taking ideas right out of an election platform.
I would like to speak about Jean Charest's plan for Canada's next century. That is the platform on which I ran in the 1997 election. I will step through some of what we were talking about. I want you to listen carefully, Mr. Speaker, to see whether or not you agree with what I am saying. There is a direct link between the present bill and what we had in our platform in 1997. I am accusing the government of lifting the idea right out of our platform in 1997.
Mr. Charest spoke about health care for the future on page 27 of his plan. He talked about our health care system needing flexibility. He said we should continue to adopt new medical treatments. He said specifically that new pilot and experimental programs would provide Canadians with state of the art, cutting edge services and treatments and new technologies to improve the access to care in rural and remote areas of the country. The minister spoke specifically of rural areas today. He said there would be programs to test new integrated delivery systems aimed at providing health care based on the highest quality and best practices. Again, the minister mentioned that this morning.
Mr. Charest also spoke of the development and maintenance of a Health Canada worldwide website on the Internet to provide a state of the art health care information system, including advice on the prevention and treatment of illnesses to help hospitals and researchers link their knowledge bases. He spoke very specifically about linking the knowledge bases in the country. In fact that is what the new agency will be doing. He spoke about working closely with the provinces and territories to reduce unnecessary health care expenditures that result from duplication and reinvest the savings back into the fund.
This is almost word for word what we were saying in the 1997 election campaign. The Progressive Conservative Party said that it would create a national institute for health with memberships drawn from the health care field. The board would be co-chaired by the federal minister and provincial territorial ministers.
To conclude, we said we would co-ordinate the gathering and distribution of information on research and new medical technologies with an emphasis on disease control, ensuring that Canadians benefit from the best and the latest medical advances; assist in the development and publication of national health care targets and goals; and measure, evaluate and publish progress toward achieving these targets.
I think the message is pretty clear. The government obviously thought it was a good idea and it is adopting it. We are pleased to support it because the idea really came from our platform in 1997. I guess that is one of the advantages of being in power. They can just take whatever part of whatever works and call it their own. Maybe there is nothing new in that at all.
Canada has had a history of advances in medical science. I want to go through some of the names. The minister mentioned this morning Best and Banting. I would like to mention a couple more. One is Sir William Osler, who wrote the medical textbook Principles and Practices of Medicine . He introduced the idea of clinical care. Another is Dr. Wilder Penfield who established the Montreal Neurological Institute and made many discoveries in the area of brain functions.
Today we have that same excellence taking place in the country. One thing I ran across in The Economist , of all places, was a procedure. Maybe that is not the best word to describe it, but it was out of the Ontario Cancer Institute. It devised a way of using high frequency ultrasound to check within a few hours after the first dose of chemotherapy being administered to find out whether or not the anti-cancer treatment is working. The article went on to explain that most cancer treatment, despite the billions of dollars that are poured into it, is by guess and by hazard in terms of whether or not the treatment is actually working.
Dr. Gregory Ozamota and his colleagues devised a new method of detecting whether or not a cancer treatment is working within hours of administering it so that patients in the future hopefully will not have to go through some of the tough medicines, the harsh chemicals in terms of treating cancer, only to find out that the treatment is not working. That is an advancement that is taking place today in Canada. This new institute will foster that type of advancement.
Canadians, as I have mentioned, are not strangers to huge advances in medical science. Despite our small population base of 30 million people, we have had some very notable achievements within the country.
One of the things the new institute will do is sort of bridge the gap between what a scientist wants to do, or is driven to do, and the need within Canadian society for that service. There will be a linkage between the two so that we will not have a scientist going out on his own pet project, to simplify it, without any payoff to the greater society at the end of the day. Funds will be channelled in such a way that there will be a real identified need within society for the research to be ongoing. That is an important distinction to make, an important point to make.
The theoretical side of science and the absent minded professor are always talked about. I read an article not long ago about Einstein. It mentioned that sometimes scientists are so focused that they are focusing on their research without focusing on the greater need of society or where the research will actually take them. The new institute will give some of our scientists a little more direction to reach the goal at the end of the day.
The story goes about Einstein that he was so indifferent to his surroundings that on more than one occasion he arrived in his laboratory in his pyjamas. I am not sure if that is happening today in Canada, but focusing our funding in the directions as outlined in the bill is a very important part of the new institute.
Another thing we would like to see happen to which the minister has alluded in the past is the drug approval process. I think it can happen. The other day it was brought to my attention that there is a new drug out called Rituxan. It is a cancer treating drug that has been tied up by red tape in the drug approval process. I want to point out what has happened in other countries. This drug has had great success in the treatment of some cancers. In just about every industrialized country in the world this drug has already been approved and is on the shelf. I will give an example of some of those countries.
In Australia, Rituxan was submitted for approval in May 1997. It was approved in October 1998 and the launch date of the drug in that country was October 1998. Germany applied on March 21, 1997. The drug was approved on June 2, 1998, and went on the market on November 26, 1998. The United States moved a little faster. The drug was submitted for approval in February 1997 and approved on November 6, 1997. The launch date was December 15, 1997.
I have no way of knowing whether or not the information I have is correct. It was provided to me by the department. Rituxan will not be approved for use in this country until late in December, if in fact it does happen. That is two years after the United States. Many of our patients are going to the United States to get this drug.
I am hoping, and the minister has alluded to it, that the process in Canada can be improved upon. It is not that we want to do it in a hasty fashion because no one wants to see that happen. However, I get the feeling we get tied up in red tape and are not sharing information with other Canadian jurisdictions which might possibly lead to a speed up in the approval process. This is something I think we can look forward to.
There are many things we cannot mention, obviously. A Reform member went to great lengths today to distance himself from some remarks he made with regard to a two tier health care system in Canada. I might possibly face some questions on that point, but I was a bit dumbfounded by some of the comments made by the member last week, and this week in attempting to distance himself from those remarks. I mention this only in the context that we are debating a very important initiative by the government. I do not think we should be sidetracked by other issues despite the difficulties some members from time to time get themselves into when they pronounce policies and positions that are not sustainable.
With that I will sit down and entertain questions and comments from other members.