Madam Speaker, the member raises a lot of things that people have talked about in the House for a long time. I would agree with them that we are facing a demographic situation as well as a number of other things which have put pressure on the health care system. Technological innovation, demographic circumstances and all kinds of things have converged to put pressure on the health care system. Nobody is denying that.
However, if we are going to work together, federally and provincially, then there has to be a commitment to equal burden sharing while we solve the problem. That is all I am saying. This is everybody's problem.
The federal government has used the federal spending power and the Canada Health Act to lay down certain conditions and to be involved in medicare, and we do not quarrel with that. If there are problems to be solved, as the member has identified, and I think identified well, then people should do that in a collegial, partnership, sharing kind of way; not by saying “There is a problem and until we solve it you guys carry 75% of the problem and when we get it solved maybe we will go back to 50:50”. I do not think that is a viable approach.
The member said that we still do not have right some of the things that were wrong 20 years ago. I would agree that there are many people in acute care beds who should be in long term care. That is a question of money. It is a question of creating those long term care facilities and beds. Or, it is a question of home care. It is probably both.
What I am concerned about when I listen to the Minister of Health and the Minister of Finance is that some months from now they will say to the provincial ministers of health “We want to have a national home care program. This is where we want to put our money”. The provincial governments will say “Wait a minute. Why should we trust you to cost share this thing with us when the last thing you cost shared with us you pulled out of unilaterally?” Then we could have—and this is the scenario I am afraid of—the Minister of Health saying “We wanted to have a national home care program, but the provinces would not let us. We offered to work with them, but no, they did not want to do it”, the same way it was done with the national day care program, which was pinned on the provinces. They said “We wanted to have a national day care program, but we talked to the provinces and they were not interested”. I can see the same kind of scenario developing with another national program, whereby we would get more politics and not the re-infusion of money into the system which is really needed.
As far as other matters, there are many people who go to the hospital and before they know it they are out, whereas 20 or 25 years ago they would have stayed two, three, four or five days. Let us not pretend that nothing has happened. There are many people who do not spend anywhere near the amount of time in hospital they used to. We have done all of that and we still have a problem.