Mr. Chairman, there is no question that the member's earlier comments about stable funding is the most important thing in terms of planning for health care.
The deal the Prime Minister made with the provinces on September 11, 2000, was a commitment to that kind of stable funding with money targeted toward information technology, primary care and those types of things.
Some people feel that infusing money every time the opposition asks for it destabilizes the health care system. Some political scientists and observers feel that planning is more important to health care than just throwing money at it, which was the problem in the eighties. Monique Bégin said that we threw all the extra money at the system in the eighties with no appreciable increase in the quality.
We need to make sure we have a cost effective assessment of the dollars we spend, not a cost containment. The cost containment model ruined the system in the nineties. Province after province and regional health authority after regional health authority were not prepared to make the tough decisions to get rid of the stuff that did not work any more and continued to ask for more money. Instead of moving toward a more cost effective model they just cut.
In deciding where we want the money, I would like more money to go into accountability, transparency and information technology to create a real system. It may be an infusion in terms of what we described. Sharon Sholzberg-Gray and maybe the Fyke commission have said that we might need $6 billion to fund the secretariat or whatever would actually help us design an information technology system for the whole country with the feedback loops around quality and accountability. Just giving money to provinces that goes for strikes and labour disruptions has not been effective up until now.