Mr. Speaker, there is no question about it that health care is in a crisis in this country. There are two reasons for it: one man and one party, that man being the Prime Minister of Canada and that party being the Liberal Party of Canada, aided and abetted by two others, the Minister of Finance who is the real health minister and the Minister of Health who is a secondary player in this equation.
The budget the Liberal Party, the Government of Canada, brought down the other day is basically an insult to the intelligence of every living, breathing Canadian. If we take a look what the government is putting back into health care, the numbers speak for themselves.
Every premier in the country, regardless of political stripe, has just simply told us that the money this government puts back into the system over the course of the next four years will run the system for three days. In the province that runs it the money put back into the system would amount to about $15 million this year. In a small province like New Brunswick with only slightly over 700,000 people that will run the system for three days. At $5 million a day, in three days that money is used up. That tells us how much the government has done.
What amazes me in this debate is that it has been the Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Finance who has been on his feet this morning more than anyone else. It is quite obvious that the finance minister is speaking on this issue. He is the one who is setting the tone for the government. He is the one who is calling the shots.
Unfortunately it is a leadership game being played out within the Liberal caucus. On the front benches of the Liberal Party that debate is being carried out between the health minister and the finance minister. That leadership race is being carried out at the expense of every single Canadian.
When they are on their feet it is always with patronizing platitudes. They do not talk about the real issues. They do not talk about the crisis. They try to comfort it in a sense. Basically what they said this morning was, “We are going to look for some long term common goals. We are going to talk about innovative, co-operative kinds of ideas that might lead us down the road in the right direction”.
We are tired of that. The Liberals have been in office for seven years. If they were serious about fixing Canada's health care system they would have started on the day they were elected back in 1993. But what did they do? By themselves they systematically and intentionally took $17 billion out of the system.
Despite it being the so-called health budget last year, at the end of four years we are going back to the same levels of funding for health care that we had in the early 1990s. Right now we are 10 years behind the times. Let us look at some of the statistics.
Mr. Speaker, I should also point out that I am splitting my time with the member for Shefford.
There are shortages of nurses, shortages of beds and shortages of doctors. There is a shortage of pathologists. That is important because pathology is at the root of diagnostic medicine. We have to know what is wrong with us before we can be treated.
This is factual, right out of the Library of Parliament. I issued a report on this. In 1993 there were 1,200 pathologists in this country and as I speak the number is down to 1,000. In the meantime the Canadian population has grown. It is an aging population. There are fewer people to diagnose what is wrong with us.
I believe it was yesterday that the president of the United States mentioned that over 50,000 Americans are dying because of the wrong diagnosis. The same thing is happening in Canada. Unfortunately we have not commissioned a study but that is just an indication of how bad the system is. There is only one party to blame. There is only one Prime Minister to blame. That is today's Prime Minister.
Talk as they may, the Liberals cannot get out from underneath the problem. They messed up. They are very reluctant to admit it and even more reluctant to do anything about it.
Here is what the premier of Ontario had to say about our present health minister. I am quoting Mike Harris out of the Ottawa Sun :
I met with Mr. Rock three years ago at the first ministers conference. He thought after three minutes of being health minister he was smarter than every other premier, every other minister of health, every other department of health, the OMA, the nurses' association, said Harris. But he has no ideas, no initiatives. He's given us nothing. Now it seems like he's convinced the Prime Minister and Paul Martin that he has a secret plan to miraculously deliver better health care for fewer dollars.
If he has a plan, would he please tell us what it is? Tell us what it is. The Liberals do not have a plan. They have no ideas. Day to day they stumble along making it up as they go along. That is exactly what the Canadian Medical Association has been saying for seven years.
We have to know where we are going. We have to know where the funding is and how much is going to be there at the end of the day. We cannot continue on these one and two year ad hoc programs in terms of funding and direction. That is exactly what the Liberals have been doing. Exactly what the Liberals have been doing is making it up as they go along with no long term plan.
Not too many weeks ago on the CBC news show The Magazine many of us saw the program on health care in Canada and cancer patients. The government is what we would call penny wise and pound foolish. Think of it. We are sending cancer patients, women with breast cancer, men with prostate cancer, people with other forms of cancer from Ontario to Cleveland in the United States of America for treatment. Where it becomes so bizarre it is almost hard to believe is that the treatment in the United States costs something in the order of $20,000 per patient. In Canada we could do the same treatment for $3,000 a patient. Why can we not do it? It is simply because of the draconian cutbacks that have been systematic and ongoing for seven years.
Penny wise and pound foolish; the Liberals are living examples of that. How they can stand on their hind legs in this place and support that budget is beyond my belief. This is a debate that has to happen, should happen and has to be ongoing. The Liberals have absolutely nothing to brag about in that budget, particularly on health care.
Getting into the finances of the budget, everything is three or four years down the road. The hidden message is “Vote for us and in four or five years you might get a tax break if we are still in office”.
That is not the way to run a country. It is not the way to run a health care system. There are 10 premiers that back me up on that statement. Every premier including the Liberal premier of Newfoundland says that our system is broken and is going to disappear unless the federal government does something about it.
The Liberals are in the driver's seat. It is their constitutional responsibility to fix health care. They set the rules. They have to work with the provinces to make sure that we sustain the best system in the world. That best system in the world has been eroding for the last seven years. It is the number one issue on the minds of every Canadian. Canadians know our system is disappearing before their very eyes. It is time we took the Liberals to task for it.
It starts and stops right at the feet of the Prime Minister. The buck stops there. He has to take his duties seriously. He has to give some direction to the finance minister and the health minister. They had better stop playing those childish leadership games.
In one or two weeks it will be pretty obvious to the national press when they sort this stuff out that it is playing out exactly as I say it and as we see it. It is one minister versus the other to become the leader of the Liberal Party, one at the expense of the other. At the end of the day, every one of us is paying the cost in terms of health care.