Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak about the very important issue of health care. We have seen the decline of health care for a number of years. I can only go to the facts in my own riding with which I am very familiar. I hear the stories from across the country about waiting lists. I would like to take a few minutes to talk about some of these problems and then what I see as the solution to fix health care in the country.
For those who are not from British Columbia, Victoria is in my riding of Saanich—Gulf Islands. Victoria has one of two level two ICU pediatric intensive care units. The other is in Vancouver. The Victoria level two ICU unit for children is in the process of closing purely because of money. I spoke privately with Mr. Closson, the CEO of the Victoria health board. He told me that this discussion started purely because of economics.
There are other concerns. Saanich Peninsula Hospital is in my riding. Health services are being restructured there as well. What are we seeing? We are seeing a decrease in the level of service. It is believed that the hospital will be shutting down the emergency department and will have only acute care beds. Patients on the Saanich peninsula will now have to go to Victoria General.
The problem is that wherever we go in this country, from coast to coast to coast, the level of service is decreasing and the waiting lists are getting longer. The system is seriously broken. I think members opposite recognize that we need to revisit how we deliver health care. If we look at the demographics, the population is aging. Nobody can deny that greater demands will be placed on our health care.
I personally believe in one national public health care system. We need to work harder to make sure that happens. Our health care system is sacred to Canadians. The status quo is not going to do it now. We saw the magnitude of something like $25 billion knocked out of health care in the last seven or eight years, which is a significant amount of money. When that much money is taken out of the pot, it is impossible to deliver the same amount of health care.
Beyond the financial aspect, we also have to be very innovative. We have to look at new ideas and be open to them. We have to be open to change on how we can best deliver the most amount of health care to Canadians and that the money we put in reaches the patient.
There are two side to this, the money side and the innovative side when looking for new ideas for delivering health care.
I first want to talk about the economics of health care. We often hear members from all parties in the House talking about putting more money into it. It needs to be emphasized that there is only one way we will be able to put the amount of money into health care to sustain it for a long time and that is through the private sector. I am not talking about the private sector creating its own health care system.
However, it is important to understand that governments cannot create wealth. The only people who can create wealth is the private sector. I firmly believe, if we want to have a truly sustainable health care system that Canadians can be proud of, that we will have to cut taxes to make Canada number one in the world and allow the private sector to flourish so that we attract investors from around the world to come to Canada. Only then will we begin to create wealth that the government can then use, through taxation, to deliver health care.
That me brings to the second part of why I got into politics. When I spoke to Mr. Closson in Victoria, he said “Mr. Lunn, yes, we are having to restructure what services we deliver out of what hospitals because there is only such money in the pot and we can only deliver so much. He continued on to say that they had a bigger problem that was not getting the emphasis it needed. He said that in Victoria this summer they will have to close hospital beds because they will not have the staff. He said that they could not attract people for summer relief because they were going south. He said that the brain drain in the health care sector was a real crisis, that it would take a long time to fix it and that they needed to start now.
We are not addressing those concerns and it comes back to taxes. It is my personal belief that this all comes back to economic prosperity. I firmly believe that if we are going to have the money to deliver health care, if we want to attract people to stay and if we want the graduates out of post-secondary school to achieve their dreams, we will have to look at how we tax people. I want to emphasize that because I do not believe it is said often enough.
The other half of the equation is that we have to be innovative. We often hear about bill 11. The New Democratic Party motion, in particular where it says “we have grave reservations about investing public funds in private for profit facilities”, are words it likes to use to try to raise the hair on the back of people's necks. It talks about profits and corporations making money. I absolutely believe that we have to look at what is being done in Alberta before we blatantly criticize it. At least Alberta is trying to be innovative.
I firmly believe in a truly national public health care system, not the two tiers that we have now. The majority of the Canadian population lives within 100 or 150 kilometres of the U.S. border. The border very accessible to people across the country.
The status quo is not working. I know my colleague from Okotoks is listening with interest to this and feels very passionate about this subject. I am no expert in this, but maybe the private sector could do a better job in some parts of our public system. For example, with MRIs and CAT scans, maybe there are places where clinics could be set up that could do a better job at delivering these services. This would reduce the waiting lists across the country. I do not know, but we have to be open to looking at these ideas.
If we are going to be able to deliver health care to an aging population, we need to ensure that we receive the very best value for our health care dollars. I do not know the actual number, but I think we spend something in the magnitude of $90 billion on health care globally across the country. That is a number that we cannot even wrap our heads around.
Are we getting $90 billion worth of health care? The people in my constituency would argue that they are not. I am going to a meeting on Saturday when I go home because people are really upset about the emergency ward being shut down at the Saanich Peninsula Hospital. They are shutting down one of two ICU level two pediatric units in British Columbia. All of them will now have to go over to the children's hospital in Vancouver. When we start to withdraw our services in various areas that is wrong.
I personally will be voting against this motion because I think we need to be innovative when we look at how we deliver health care. We have to be open to new ideas. They may not work but we need to know that and we need to let the rest of the provinces learn from that. Let us try new things. Let us collectively collect all of that information. If we need to open the Canada Health Act, let us make it better and stronger.
Most important, we need to look at the economics of this. We need to attract investors from all sectors. We need to reduce taxes so people will want to stay in the country. It has been proven in every single jurisdiction, whether it is Hong Kong, Ireland, Ontario or Alberta, that when taxes are cut government revenues go up.
Let us make Canada number one. We can be better than the United States. We can be the best. We need that economic wealth if we want to sustain the health care that Canadians take so much pride in.