Mr. Speaker, I would like to pick up my comments from where I left off on October 28 and also inform you that I will be sharing the rest of my time with the good member for Pickering--Ajax--Uxbridge who also wants to talk on health care.
As I said before, I am the chair of our national rural caucus and I would like to give the House a perspective of what we as rural Canadians experience with health care. Right now almost 30% of the population is spread out over 95% of the land area. There are proportionately more seniors in rural Canada. Rural Canada has only 50% as many physicians per thousand people as urban Canada. The average rural citizen lives 10 kilometres away from a doctor, compared to two kilometres for the average urban resident. Approximately 7% of rural residents live more than 25 kilometres from a doctor. Of the 16,000 people who live in the northern regions, two-thirds live over 100 kilometres away from a doctor.
I have talked before about how important it is that we get things as transparent as possible, and this is going to come down to a dollar figure. This is the issue I want to raise. First, did the federal government and the provincial governments ever split health care costs fifty-fifty? The answer is no. In the early 1970s, only doctors and hospital services costs were split fifty-fifty, and when costs of other health care services that the provinces chose to include in their insurance program, such as home care in some provinces, were added up, the federal contribution was about 40%.
Is it accurate to say that the current federal contribution to health care is 14%? Again, the answer is no. The provinces arrived at this percentage by counting some of the federal moneys and not others. They are not counting the Canada health and social transfer tax points, the equalization payments they receive from the federal government or direct health care spending by the federal government.
Next we would have to ask, what are tax points? Tax points were established in 1977. They are a direct transfer of tax collection to provinces. This means that the federal government lowered its tax rate and allowed provincial governments to raise their rates by the same amount. The result? More taxes flowed directly to provincial coffers. There was no change in the amount of taxes paid by Canadians. The change was the destination: from the federal coffers to the provincial coffers. Since these tax points were never transferred back to the federal government, provincial governments continue to benefit from them. In fact, in 2001-02, the tax points given to provincial governments amount to nearly $16.3 billion.
How much money does the Government of Canada spend on health care? Currently the Government of Canada spends money on health care in two ways: first, through transfer to the provinces and the territories which I have already partially described; and second, through direct spending and tax credits. Basically, that money goes directly to aboriginals, Inuit, Canadian veterans and the Canadian Forces. Transfers to the provinces and the territories are federal money transfers to the provinces through the CHST cash and tax points and through equalization payments.
Then transparency burns down to this, I believe. We must sit down with the provinces and come up with a fair, equitable, transparent system that we all agree to. Clearly to me and I hope clearly to the House, there is a heck of a lot of politics being played with this right now. Quite frankly, I think it is unconscionable to start playing politics with Canada's health care system, given the fact, as I have stated before, that by 2020-24, 25% of our population will be 65 and older. It is imperative that we get an agreement between the feds and the provinces as to how we are going to get this system running and running properly.
We have a Senate report and the Romanow report will be coming out. I would hope that these two reports will give us the basis, as a government at the federal level and governments at the provincial level, to come to some sort of agreement as to how this system is to work.
I would hope, and I will be watching, to be involved in the debate and negotiations as to how this will work.