Mr. Speaker, I am very delighted to rise in this debate because I have wanted to have my say about the problems with health care financing for some time. I think the debate has been skewed in the wrong direction. It is not a matter of giving more money to medicare, it is a matter of greater accountability.
I regret that my NDP colleagues are leaving the Chamber now as I begin a speech. They really ought to listen to it because it is not just a matter of throwing money at issues, it is a matter of creating the climate of transparency in corporations that deliver the health services to ensure that the money is adequately spent. What I am alluding to is the fact that hospitals around the country are some of the greatest users of taxpayers' money, something in the order of $30 billion to $40 billion a year. They are the prime deliverers of health care.
The difficulty is that hospitals are charities and charities are not governed by any meaningful legislation which requires them to meet the standards of corporate governance, standards of transparency. The result is that across the country we will find hospitals that vary in the quality of their financial administration and their ability to efficiently deliver health services. We are talking about billions of dollars of waste because we cannot see whether the hospitals are spending the money effectively.
What has happened with the cutbacks in health care, whether the cutbacks were done by the federal government or the cutbacks were done by the provincial governments during the mid-1990s, is a cutting off of the services rather than cutting back the administration. This was a phenomenon that occurred in the United Kingdom.
The United Kingdom went through a similar period when it tried to rein in the high costs of medicare. The British government cut back investments in its hospitals and what happened was an enormous cutback in nurses and nursing staff and of course the administrators remained. The Tony Blair government learned its lesson and in fact it is restoring many of the service personnel and cutting back on the administrators.
Mr. Speaker, you might ask what is he really talking about? Does he have any real examples? We do not have to go very far in my community to discover a real example of waste in the delivery of hospital services.
Next to my own riding is the Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation which last year posted a $40 million deficit. This coming year it is expected to post a $90 million deficit. Mr. Speaker, it has something very much to do with the failure of the board of governors or the failure of the hospital management to adequately inform the board of governors on the needs of that hospital and the proper functioning of that hospital.
Indeed, Mr. Speaker, there was a scandal not very many years ago at the hospital. The chief director was brought in at a huge salary.