Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak to Bill S-17, an act to amend the Patent Act.
It is a pleasure for me to talk about the bill but I find it quite unfortunate that the current government, the Liberal government, cannot solve the problem with patent drugs here in Canada.
It is well known that there is a problem with the health system everywhere in the country and not only in New Brunswick. I am sure that it is not limited to Quebec or to Ontario. It is a problem everywhere. However, there is another problem related to that one and it is the issue of patent drugs.
We could tell all sorts of stories about this. Usually it is the people from poor families who are the greatest consumers of patent drugs. Poor families do not have enough money to feed their children properly and they often end up in the hospital. They are the ones who consume a lot of patent drugs. Moreover, they do not have enough money to take care of their children's well-being, and not only their children's.
I will tell a little story. It deals with patent drugs. The story even made me cry, and the member for Acadie—Bathurst usually does not weep easily.
One day I received in my office a tape that was sent to me by a man from Val Doucet, in New Brunswick. The man could neither read nor write and he had sent me a tape on which he told me a sad story. I took the tape and brought it home. I sat in the living room and listened to it.
It was a sad story. It made me cry. It had to do with the document I have here.
The man was telling me that he drew $404 a month from the Canada pension plan and had a card to get free prescription drugs through welfare. When his pension was increased by a few cents, he fell into a new bracket and lost his drug card.
In the tape that he sent me, he told me that now, when he went to bed at night, he cried in pain because he could not afford to buy drugs. The patent drugs he needed were too expensive. He also needed to go to the dentist but because he could not afford that either he had blood on his pillow when he woke up in the morning.
It is sad when people in Canada have to go through that because they cannot afford to buy patent drugs.
I met families last week who were saying the same thing, that drugs were too expensive and that they did not have a drug card and could not get one.
As reported in Hansard on December 8, 1992, the government House leader said this:
Mr. Speaker, I welcome this opportunity to take part in today's debate and speak to the first motion, the first amendment to the bill. I congratulate the hon. member for Dartmouth who so ably defended the interests of Canadian consumers and all Canadians who will suffer the disastrous effects of this Tory policy.
The hon. members across the floor are engaged in the process of passing a bill from the other place that they did not have the gumption to introduce themselves. They brought it in by the back door from over there.
In 1992, the present Liberal leader said the following, which I shall quote because it is worthwhile:
Mr. Speaker, I welcome this opportunity to take part in today's debate and speak to the first amendment to the bill. I congratulate the hon. member for Dartmouth—
That person had to be a Liberal.
—who so ably defended the interests of Canadian consumers and all Canadians who will suffer the disastrous effects of this Tory policy.
Today, Liberals are standing up to say “We are doing this to save the world”. Where were they in 1992? This is shameful. They are working along with the drug companies on drug patents in the same way they operated with the GST.
They said that if they were in power they would do away with the GST. Once in power, they continued it. They said that if they were in power there would be no free trade. They now are and we did get free trade. They said that if they were in power they would remove the patents so the sick and the poor could buy drugs at affordable prices. That is what they should have done. Well, they changed their mind and now, because they are the government, they do not have a choice.
We have lots of stories to tell about the Liberals. We could talk about the $35 billion they took from workers who lost their jobs. We could talk about that too.
We could tell stories that are rather funny. We know, for example, that one company gave $100,000 to the Liberal Party, including $33,000 from Glaxo Wellcome, $25,000 from Merck Frosst and $10,000 from Dupont in the same year. I understand why they are saying today that the drug regulations should not be changed.
This reminds us of the U.S. health care system. Why is the U.S. health care system private? For the same reasons. It is because corporations pay politicians to keep it private and in turn get money from them. This is what is happening here.
The Liberals do not care about people who are sick. The Liberals do not care about people who suffer from liver disease or other ailments. The Liberals could not care less. It is a disgrace.
Yesterday I spent a whole day at the Bathurst hospital. There were people, women and children, on stretchers while on the third floor some departments were closed and beds were empty. The situation is that bad in this country. It is a disgrace to see such a thing in Canada, the most beautiful country in the world. We should be ashamed to go around claiming we have the most beautiful country in the world when sick children spend three or four hours crying in the emergency department. They cannot get service.
When people enter hospitals, nurses tell them “I am exhausted”. They also told me “Sir, I am exhausted, I cannot cope with the situation any more”. Doctors say the same thing “I worked all weekend, all week and I am exhausted”. I have a nephew who is in hospital in Quebec City. As soon as he came back from the United States he was hospitalized in Quebec City. This was the third hospital he had gone to. Overnight, we found ourselves without any services. That is what the health care system is like in Canada.
When the Liberals were in the opposition they boasted. They shouted out “Vote for us, we will change everything”. They gave us back the GST. How very kind of them.
This week, I spoke to some employers. One of them told me “The only thing Liberals did is that they gave me their work; I collect GST from people and every three months I have to do the books for them. After that, they put us into debt”. Thanks a lot.
The only thing Liberals did for us is that they privatized everything around us, even Petro-Canada last week. Liberals were supposed to be on the left, in the centre or wherever. However, I know where they are. They are in the Pacific and in the Atlantic but they have forgotten to come to Canada.
This is where the Liberals are because they do not care about Canadians. They make promises but in fact they are lies. Mr. Speaker, excuse me for using those words, but this is the truth. This is what is really happening. This is what people in my region and all over are saying. You are smiling for a good reason, Mr. Speaker, you know I am right.
This is no joke. I talked earlier about all the money the government stole from the EI fund. I also mentioned that more than 800,000 workers are not eligible for EI benefits and that 1.4 million children go hungry. Can the members imagine how destitute these people are?
During the weekend, as I toured my riding, some people asked me “Where are we going as a country? What are politicians thinking about? Are they not supposed to stand up for us?”
The only thing we hear from right wing governments is: how can this large company make a profit, how can this big insurance company manage, how can we protect this business here and that business there? But then in the throne speech the government tells us that it wants to take care of children.
In 1989, the House passed a motion calling on the government to eradicate child poverty in Canada by 1999. Children would no longer go to school on an empty stomach. Nowadays, not only are these children still hungry but they also cannot afford whatever medication they need.
We could be considering a bill to set the price of drugs and make them more affordable but no, we need to take care of the large companies, those that make $100,000 donations to the government party. Those are the people we need to protect.
I went to the United States and talked with some people who have a private drug plan. Life can be tough for workers with a private drug plan who end up sick in hospital. If they do not have hospital insurance and have to sell their house and their car and declare bankruptcy, it is no joke. Is that what we want as Canadians? The government is doing nothing to stop this situation.
I am afraid of free trade and I am afraid of NAFTA. I am still afraid of the free trade area of the Americas as in the negotiations we had in Quebec City and the way those peacefully demonstrating were treated. Not everyone went over the perimeter fence. People were sitting there peacefully demonstrating and the RCMP shot them with plastic bullets.
They used tear gas on people who were fighting against the big machine. The big machine was inside. I was proud to be in Quebec City, to be outside the security perimeter fence with the people who elected me. I much prefer to be with those who elected me than to be inside the fence with the Bush gang and all the others, with the American helicopters flying overhead. We felt like we were not in Canada any more. This is the way we will be run by a country called the United States.
It would be unfortunate if the government passed the bill. I am sure that if the government took just a half an hour, not much more, and looked back over its years in opposition in 1989, 1991 and 1992, it would say “We were pretty smart then”. We all complained about what the Progressive Conservatives were doing. The only problem is that the day after the election the Liberals had a shot and it was just as if the Conservatives were there.
Let us look after the big corporations.
This is what it looks like. You know what? I pray God that I never become a government member because some magical thing happens as soon as one is in office. It would seem that one instantly forgets everything he or she said before and everything that Canadians wanted.
I do not deny the fact that during the election campaign the NDP talked a lot about health care. According to the polls, Canadians felt that health was the number one priority in Canada. Canadians did not want to go to the hospital and find their grandfather or grandmother in a corridor. Nor did they want to find their children in the corridors. They wanted to find them in a hospital bed and they wanted them to be cared for.
If we go to a veterinarian there are no dogs or cats in the corridor because they are being treated. Humans, however, are left in the corridors.
I spent the whole day in the hospital yesterday. I saw a woman with a child wrapped in a blanket and everybody was just walking by. It is shameful to have this kind of health care in Canada. Then the government tells us that it has nothing to do with money if we do not have a good health care system, that we should be doing things differently.
Maybe we could do things differently. We see people take to the hospital someone who is scheduled for surgery in three weeks, and that person is kept in the hospital for three weeks just to ensure he or she does not lose his or her place. Maybe it would be less expensive to send that person home. That would be doing things differently.
The government cannot come here and say that we must protect companies by allowing them to sell their pills and make profits for 20 years while another company could sell the same pills for less.
Where is the free market the Liberals used to talk about so much? Now they no longer support the free market because they know they have to protect a couple of companies that will give over $100,000 to the government for the next election. That is what is happening.
If we look at the health care situation in Canada, hospitals are in pretty bad shape, as are long term care facilities. Governments send people from the hospital to a long term care facility and there is nobody to take care of them there.
A few weeks ago I visited a long term care facility. It reminded me of an assembly line. An elderly man and an elderly woman were sitting there and somebody had a plate and was feeding them as if they were animals. That is how it is now in Canada. It is a disgrace. This is what is happening in the country. I am not here this evening to make things up. This is what is happening in the country and it is a real disgrace.
Who are the people we are talking about? Us. We will perhaps be the next ones who will need to go into a nursing home. We will be the next ones sitting in a hospital waiting for care. We will be the ones asking where the nurse is. The poor nurse is pretty tired. She works a 12 hour shift five or six days in a row. The doctor is pretty tired too. The one I met yesterday sure was. He said “There are people to hand out pills to them from time to time but they have to come to the hospital”. After that, they are on their own.
As I said, the way things are going in our country we can have a great old time here. It is not hard for us. If we are ill, we go to the pharmacy, get a prescription filled, send it in to the government and it is paid for. Decisions such as these are all very fine and well.
But the poor father who works as a logger, for instance, who has no drug plan or who does not receive welfare will have to pay $50 or $60 dollars for pills for his child who comes home sick after a day at school. There is also the 64 year old woman who came to my office and said “The pills for me and my husband cost $200 a month”. Do people think I am kidding? Do they think this is how these people want to die? Do they think they want to die suffering like this?
The Liberals should do some soul searching. They may be boasting that there is no problem but we are still in this predicament. The Prime Minister is bragging that he has been here for 38 years and that he will stay until it is 40. We will soon have a celebration. It is going to be a lot of fun.
In the meantime, Canadians suffer, people have a hard time and the government is not doing what it should be doing. It is not keeping its election promises. During a campaign it makes a lot of promises but as soon as the election is over, it does not give a hoot. It is laughing at people. This is unacceptable. As human beings, Canadians deserve more than that.
Nowadays, if someone is seen hitting a dog that person is picked up and locked up. The same thing can happen to those who do not feed or care for their pet.
However, those who do not feed their child because they have no money, if the government says the word, will have to pay. There will be nothing on this point in the legislation. That is the law in Canada. It is possible to make people suffer.
I say there should be a law against this. We should not be allowed to make people, youngsters suffer. The elderly, those who retire should be able to pay for their drugs without skimping on food.
If the Liberals had a place in their hearts for Canadians, they would take the appropriate measures. They would change the law and pass a real bill that would please Canadians.