Mr. Speaker, I am very interested in the hon. member's comments on the underfunding of medicare. He is, after all, very familiar with the system, having worked in it.
The problems with medicare are not confined to any particular province or to any particular stripe of provincial government. I live in Saskatchewan, the cradle of medicare, which has a dreadful situation. I do not blame the provincial government. I do not agree with its politics, but I cannot point to the provincial government and say it has allowed the system to collapse out of malice or ineptitude. It has collapsed because of chronic underfunding from the federal government, which has lowered its annual contributions from 50% when it started out down to about 15% now. No provincial government can stand that.
There are hospitals in Saskatchewan where elderly helpless people have to rely upon relatives and friends to bathe them and to feed them because there simply is not enough staff to carry the load. I have had personal experience in this regard.
I have lived in several Third World countries and that is the way hospitals operate there. When did we get to that stage of development in Canada? This is awful. I blame the members over there totally for this situation. They took $21 billion out of the health system in a period of only five years and now, whoopie, they are to put $11.5 billion of it back over the next five years. For that we are supposed to be eternally grateful.
The hon. member is a medical doctor. I would like him to comment more fully on that. I am sure his range of knowledge is wider than mine. I can speak only anecdotally, having seen these things with my own eyes. I would like him to say whether he believes any province is doing worse than another or can be blamed for the disastrous condition of medical care in Canada today.