Mr. Speaker, today's debate is a very important one in terms of the future of health care in the country.
I come from Regina. Regina was the birthplace of public health care in the country many years ago. It really started with the CCF in the election of 1944. It was after the Great Depression and there had not been an election since 1938 in the province. The previous Liberal government had gone on for six years during the war without an election campaign. When the campaign came, Tommy Douglas and the CCF were swept to power. One of the promises they made to the people of that province was for health care and hospitalization.
In those days there was not any thought at all of the federal government cost sharing health care. Under our constitution, health care comes under the jurisdiction of the provinces and the federal government gets involved through the use of the spending power, but it was a long time before those discussions were held.
The CCF came to power in that small province of about one million people. They had come through the Great Depression and a tremendous dust bowl in terms of drought. There was bankruptcy such that the province was almost foreclosed upon by the bankers. Despite that, three or four years after it came to power, the CCF set up the first hospitalization plan anywhere in North America. That was about 1948.
As the years went on, it became more and more popular and the idea caught on around the country that public health care was extremely important. By the time the CCF government had improved and strengthened the economy with balanced budgets and so on, it made a commitment. In 1960 with Tommy Douglas as premier, it promised it would bring in North America's first public medicare program.
The people of Saskatchewan re-elected Tommy Douglas and the CCF and they had a mandate to bring in public health care. Tommy Douglas resigned about a year later to become the leader of the federal New Democratic Party, but the minister of education, Mr. Woodrow Lloyd, became premier. It was Mr. Lloyd who was premier at the time medicare became a reality in the province of Saskatchewan.
I was 14 or 15 years old at the time and just going into high school. I remember the summer of 1961 or 1962 when health care came in. There was a doctors' strike against what they called the socialistic move to intervene in the marketplace in terms of health care. The opposition of course was the Liberal Party but it was a very conservative Liberal Party, quite similar to what is called the Canadian Alliance today or the Reform Party. It opposed this as a tremendous infringement on the freedom of Saskatchewan people and predicted that it would spread across the country.
The doctors' strike went on for about 28 days and created a great deal of emotion. There were many demonstrations and a lot of struggle and debate in the province, but the provincial government prevailed. I remember very well seeing a picture of the leader of the opposition, because the legislature was not in session in the summer, going to the legislative chamber and demanding that the speaker call a special session to deal with the doctors' strike. Of course it did not happen, but I still remember the picture of him kicking the door of the Saskatchewan legislature. He had his foot up in the air and he was kicking the door. That snapshot of him went right across the country.
The people prevailed and the CCF government of Woodrow Lloyd prevailed. In 1961 and 1962 we had our first ever medicare system anywhere in the country, financed entirely by the people of the province of Saskatchewan as the federal government was not involved in any way in a cost sharing program in those days.
A few years later the federal government established the Hall commission with Justice Emmett Hall of the supreme court. He looked at the idea of a national health care program and federal funding for health care along with the provinces in a co-funding operation.
In 1967, centennial year, I think Lester Pearson was Prime Minister at the time and the health minister was Paul Martin Sr., the federal government finally brought in a national health care program modelled on the prototype in the province of Saskatchewan. The agreement was that the federal government would cost share with the provinces 50% of the costs for health care. In other words for every dollar put up by the province of Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, or British Columbia the federal government would put up a dollar as well.
In the original negotiations the federal government was not going to be that benevolent or generous. But guess what, it was an Ontario premier in those days as well, and the Government of Ontario under Robarts was threatening not to participate in the national health care program. When the federal government decided to put up 50% of the costs, the carrot was so big that even Ontario with its wealth in those days decided it could not afford not to participate and became part of the national health care program we know today.
Things went pretty smoothly for a number of years. Then in the 1970s if I recall—I was a member of parliament by that time being elected in 1968—the federal government of Pierre Trudeau brought in a bill that untied the federal contribution from going directly to health care in terms of the transfers to the provinces. I remember Tommy Douglas sat roughly where the Conservative Party is sitting today at the far end of the Chamber. He stood up and said that if we untied the federal contribution to health care, that which goes directly to health care, the day would come when the federal government involvement would lessen gradually and gradually and we would have a crisis in the funding of health care.
I remember him speaking in Winnipeg in about 1981 or 1982 and giving the same warning in front of a huge crowd at a national convention. I remember him saying that people assume that health care is here to stay. We assume it is here. It is a good plan. We assume it is here forever but some day someone is going to try to take it away and that day is not too far down the road. How true that was.
If I were to sit back in those days and predict who would try to do it, I do not think I would have predicted it would be a Liberal government that would get us into a health care crisis. However it was the Liberal government, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance and their famous budget in 1995 that had the most radical cutbacks in social programs and health care this country has ever seen at any level of jurisdiction in the history of Canada.
I look across the way at the member from New Brunswick, the minister in charge of homelessness, the Minister of Labour. I know her background in activism. I sometimes wonder how she can sit in that government and support it after these tremendous conservative cutbacks that Brian Mulroney would not have even contemplated in his most conservative days when he was Prime Minister.
That is the legacy of the Liberal Party that sits across the way. Now we are in a crisis. We are in a crisis where some provinces, such as Alberta, are getting into the business of two tier medicine and looking at privatizing part of the medical system, allowing people to get back into health care for a profit. If we go down that steep and slippery road, the time will come when health care will be destroyed. We will have two systems in this country, one for the rich who can afford to buy the extras, jump the queues, get health care, and one for the poor who have to line up at the doors of public care institutions.
The reason public health care started in the first place was so that each and every Canadian citizen, regardless of wealth, regardless of income, regardless of region would have equal access to a public health care system. That is the kind of system we are going to have to keep in this country.
I will close by saying something that makes it even more sad in my opinion. I picked up this morning's newspaper and the headline was, “Federal surplus is higher by $11 billion”. The federal surplus is $11 billion higher for the year 1999-2000 than was predicted in the budget last February. In other words the federal surplus will be $14.9 billion instead of the predicted $3.9 billion, an extra $11 billion. A lot of that extra $11 billion could have been spent on health care in terms of helping the crisis from one end of the country to the other.
The money is there. It is not as if we were running a huge deficit. It is not as if we cannot afford to do this. The money is there. What we are lacking is the political will. That is why we tabled this motion in the House today to try to instigate a great national debate, to say “Health care is the most important priority in the country. It is about time we reinvest in social programs, starting with health care”. The money is there. Let us use the people's money to invest in a good health care system for the people of this country for our future.