Mr. Speaker, I have been listening to this debate with a lot of interest. The member across the way raises an important point which is key to what we will have to discuss here because eventually the debate will get down to the dollars.
As the chair of national rural caucus, our caucus has been debating the health issue in rural Canada at great lengths. We know first off that by 2024, 25% of the population will be 65 and older. It will start using the health care system much more than it has in the past. We know that a large number of people who are now in urban centres will retire back to where they originally came from, which was rural Canada. That will put a lot of stress on the health care system in rural Canada.
We must look at the funding aspect, which is accountability. We currently transfer money to the provinces through the Canada health and social transfers. Tax points and equalization payments are transferred to the provinces for direct health spending. When we take all that into consideration that is nearly 40%. Yet the provinces say that we only transfer 14%. If we are to have accountability, there has to be a transparent accounting system so we can see how much the federal government is putting into health care and how much the provinces are spending on health care. Currently that does not exist. Statements like this would not stand. We must come up with a better accounting system.
Baby boomers make up a huge part of our population, of which I am a part. Approximately 9.8 million of us were born between 1946 and 1966. That is a third of Canada's population. We are aging right now, turning 50, at the rate of 50,000 a year. We can see how this will translate.
I would hope that when the Romanow and the Senate report come out they will directly look at how we work with the provinces and the accounting system for the money that is being transferred from the federal government to the provinces. Last year we saw some high tech money that was supposed to be put into MRIs and CAT scans spent by some of the hospitals on low tech equipment like lawnmowers. I am a Kinsman, a life member of a service club. If hospitals were looking to buy low tech equipment for which the federal government has allotted high tech dollars, they should go to their local service clubs in the community and get the money that way.
I want to stress the fact that we must have a good accounting system. The federal government and the provincial governments must get together and negotiate how the accounting system will work or we will constantly be in the same trouble we are in right now. When we get into the shortage of doctors in rural Canada, we can look at things like telemedicine and nurse practitioners.