Mr. Speaker, I compliment les députés du Bloc québécois pour avoir introduit cette motion.
This situation is felt by members from across the country. All constituents will tell them that one of the greatest concerns they have is the state of affairs of our health care system. Every member in the House knows that and every member wants to fix the system.
Where we disagree perhaps is in how we want to do that. We have seen tragically played out under the parliamentary playground that exists a system where politics is taking precedence over reason and facts and where politics is taking precedence over trying to solve the problems.
If this were a petty problem were people's lives were not at stake this could continue with very little problem. The longer we wait to fix the problems within our health care system, the more Canadians will suffer and die. Members know this and also people in the public know it, sometimes from very personal experience.
The scope of the problem is massive. Across the country in hospitals, in clinics, in homes and in families we see that individuals who require essential health care services are not being provided with these services.
I will give some specific examples. In emergency rooms, 12 out of 14 bays where I have worked will be held up with patients waiting to get a bed.
Some of these patients need to get in the intensive care unit. Intensive care units have been blocked off because the hospital does not have enough money to pay for the nurses and the beds.
We have patients needing acute care services waiting in a busy emergency room for a bed. If a tragedy took place at that time, a motor vehicle accident, people would die because the services would not be there for them.
We have situations where children are put into the same rooms as dying adults. We have situations where men and women are put into large rooms with the only thing separating them being a thin sheet. All these people are sick.
We have people being discharged from hospital sick who need to be in hospital not because the health care personnel want to release them but because they do not have a choice.
We established that we have a problem with what we are asking for in terms of medical care and the resources we have. The government has money to put into health care. Understandably the government wants credit for doing that.
As my hon. colleague, the health care critic for the Reform Party, has mentioned, it serves the public not one advantage to have the political turf wars taking place preventing that money getting into the hands of the caregivers who desperately need it provide for Canadians in their moment of greatest need.
This is a turf war. It is not only taking place in health care. It is taking place in education and in areas across the country where problems are not being solved because the feds and the provinces cannot get their act together.
The federal government is in a unique leadership position. For the first time in recent memory it has an opportunity. It can call together the provincial ministers and their areas of jurisdiction to come together and say “what are you guys doing and what are we doing?”
Let us make sure the feds do what the feds do best and the provinces do what the provinces do best. Let us have a co-ordinated system where the left hand knows what the right hand is doing, not what is taking place now where there are so many levels of bureaucracy that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.
Furthermore, that system is leading to political inefficiencies and therefore inefficiencies in the way we get those services to the Canadian public.
Money is being sucked out of the management of health care instead of getting to patient care in the trenches. That is a profound tragedy.
When there is somebody who needs bypass surgery, when there is an elderly lady who has been waiting over 12 months and is in severe pain, waiting to get a hip replacement, it cannot be said to that person that we are doing our job.
I can only implore, as my colleagues have done from across party lines, the federal government to work with and not against the provinces in making this happen and also to make sure the provinces put the money they will get directly into health care.
Health care is a provincial responsibility. That is in our Constitution. It does not preclude the government from funding.
The government, we have seen, has taken away money to balance its budget. It has taken money away from health care. The government now has money to put back into health care. The government should do that.
Furthermore, we should be making sure that money goes into the meat and potatoes, into the muscle and bone of health care. In the process of cutting budgets we have cut the fat but we have also cut the meat, the muscle and the bone of health care.
As a result, we are seeing a very compromised health care system. That is why under our current system people are leaving this country, the rich, to get health care elsewhere.
I am going to speak personally and not on behalf of the Reform Party. If we are to solve this problem of limited resources and an increasing demand for health care in the future, and it will increase as our population ages and medical technology becomes more expensive, we have to think out of the box.
We have a Canada Health Act that was constructed in the 1960s and 1970s. That system was fine under the economic circumstances of that era. In 1999 we have a very different set of circumstances and we better realize that. We need to look at other models in other parts of the world such as Australia and in certain parts of Norway where they have managed to utilize their resources in such a way to ensure that people's needs are being met.
This entails getting away from the notion that the Canada Health Act has all the answers for us. Above all else we must ensure our health care system will be there for those who need it the most, the poor and underprivileged. They are the ones who are being compromised in the system today.
By preventing private services from taking place where private moneys are exchanged only in the private setting we deprive people from getting health care. Furthermore, we deprive the health care system of money without raising taxes. A private system completely independent of the public system where only private money is exchanged and no public money put into it would enable resources to get into the health care system without raising taxes.
In this system the rich would be subsidizing the poor. As it stands, people in the poor and middle class who are dependent on the public system would have services quicker and in a more efficient fashion because more public resources could be poured into the public system as individuals went into the private system. That solution benefits the poor and middle class and would seek to strengthen a publicly funded health care system that desperately needs fixing.
We do not want any kind of system that prevents the poor and middle class from getting health care services when they need them. The system we have now is preventing the poor and middle class from getting health care services when they need them. The government is rationing health care services to the public. We have created restrictions preventing people from getting the services when they need them, furthermore preventing the system from developing so it can be strengthened.
If we adhere to the current system and do not think we can make a made in Canada health care system, we are not only deluding ourselves but we are compromising the health and welfare of Canadians across the country.
All members, especially in the Reform Party, want to make sure we have a strong, publicly funded health care system for Canadians in the future. We are committed to doing that and working with whomever else wants to do the same.
