Madam Speaker, it is a privilege and a pleasure to speak today with regard to the federal budget. As the member for Yellowhead and official opposition health critic, I would like to speak to the largest expenditure in the budget, which is the proposed investment dollars for health care and the future of Canadians.
The government has a very dismal track record when it comes to health care, because it really has done nothing except pull money out of it in the mid-nineties and watched it struggle and wrestle and flap in the wind as the provinces dealt with intense problems and intense pressures as they tried to follow their mandate of delivering health care to Canadians.
Health care is number one as far as the priority of Canadians is concerned, yet the government has failed to recognize that over the past number of years. The budget is a failed opportunity by the government to drive accountability and sustainability into the health care system. I will explain that a little further as I go through my deliberations and a review of what has actually happened.
We have to understand where health care is right now. In examining the facts and figures, we see that wait times have increased. Tens of thousands of Canadians lack the ability to access a family physician. Right now in Canada we have an intense problem with the human resources side of health care. Looking at the budget and looking at the accord, and whether it was signed or not does not really matter, whether agreed to or not by the provinces and the federal government does not really matter, we recognize that precious little was done in this area.
It is no wonder that earlier this year the finance minister was forced to actually concede that his last attempt at putting dollars into the health care system, which was the September accord, was a failed attempt in the sense that it did not shorten wait lists at all or improve access to health care in any significant way. I would suggest that we will be sitting in this same Chamber a year or possibly two from now, having the same debate and examining the same problems with the same significant dilemmas when it comes to human resources in health care.
The new money is now on the table and it is time to get on with the job of real health care reform. The Canadian Alliance will hold the federal and provincial governments accountable to ensure that the new health care funding the new health spending buys genuine reform and does not allow more of the same status quo, which is not a sustainable factor. Looking at the demographics that will hit the health care system and the number of people crowding in at the age of 65 and beyond, we will not start to see any relief from that pressure of that aging demographic until the year 2040.
Therefore we have to discern very carefully the intense dilemma that we are going to be in as we move through the next 20, 30 or 40 year period. In doing so, we have to do our very best to sustain the health care system. In light of that, we have to discern whether the dollars placed in health care in this budget were appropriately placed there and whether there is appropriate accountability for those dollars.
The official opposition welcomes the health accord. We have to understand that it was really the budget for health care. The health accord was reflected within the budget; they were just two weeks away from each other. Nonetheless, it promoted and pushed forward a national agenda of health care reforms.
First and foremost, we think that Canadians will benefit when the provincial and federal governments stop their squabbling and stop their jurisdictional disputes around health care and get on with delivery. If we were to look at the numbers the day after the accord, there was some confusion in this country as to how many dollars were actually spent on health care. We should not really worry about that, because if we did not like the numbers we saw in one paper, we just had to pick up another paper to see a different set of numbers. It was that confusing. After we discern the package in the budget for health care and in the accord, there is still some confusion because there is a lot of negotiation and a lot of fuzzy areas that are yet to be determined as we move forward in the next couple of years. Nonetheless, we know that for primary health care reform there is at least $12 billion.
However, the real change in health care, the real significant paradigm shift that we need in the 21st century, is to put the interests of the patient first. We need to get on with that and we need to stop the fighting between the federal and provincial governments as to whose dollars are going into health care. Let us just start focusing on some of the things that have come out of the accord which we really agree with. I would like to talk about five of them and very briefly go through them and explain why they are important and why we agree with them.
First, the new cash infusion is very important. I talked about the $12 billion that is going into primary health care reform. We have to discern whether it is really $12 billion, because $3.9 billion of that was part of the social accord just prior to the last election. We still get this attempt by the federal government to play politics with the money by re-announcing money previously announced. I do not know how it determined that this is an ethical way to deal with taxpayers' dollars, but regardless of that, I would suggest that we quit arguing about that number. Let us just say there is $12 billion more, even if $3.9 billion of it was previously announced money and actually only $8.1 billion is going into primary health care reform.
It is absolutely pathetic when we see the number of dollars that are going in and discern that this new money is the first real, solid cash injection of money since the mid-nineties when $25 billion was pulled out of our system. Now we have provinces in which 40% of every provincial dollar goes to health care, whereas the federal government, according to Mr. Romanow's report, only contributed 12ยข of every provincial dollar that was spent on health care this last year.
We have this large injection. Some of my Liberal colleagues would say that this is not quite true because they put in all of this money in the September accord, but not really, because that was a five year accord and not one nickel of the money for health care reform went in until April of the first year. We are only now just crowding in on the third year of that. We still have two years to go on that past accord and we are re-announcing new moneys.
One thing that is important is the flexibility we see within the dollars that are being implemented into the new programs suggested by the accord and by this budget. Because provinces are the deliverers of front line health care services, it is very important that they be allowed the flexibility to apply those dollars to where they are most suited to their provinces' needs.
An example of that is New Brunswick, which has a very extensive home care program. Regarding the new dollars that are supposed to be applied to home care, at least it has the opportunity to take those dollars and apply them in other areas. That flexibility is there and we applaud the provinces for holding fast to their constitutional right in delivering health care, for not allowing the federal government to remove that from the accord or from the budget.
The third thing I want to talk about is restoring core funding to health care. It is very important that those core funds are allowed to be applied where they are most needed. It is really interesting to me to see that $243 million has been spent by the government for just studying health care over the last 10 years. That is a horrendous amount of studying.
In Mr. Romanow's study, which went on for 18 months, we see virtually a blank stare when it comes to dealing with the most significant problem in health care: the mounting wait lists. Over a million people in Canada are waiting just to try to access the services and the system. There are a number of shortages of physicians and nurses in our health care system. I have just come from a meeting with a group of physicians who were saying that the problem is much more acute than we originally had thought.
It is very important to talk about the alternative delivery system that the provinces need and must have the flexibility to be able to deliver on. Monopolies never work, whether they are private or public monopolies. We need to make sure that the provinces are allowed to be able to drive efficiency, accountability and sustainability into our health care system. Thank goodness that they have retained this under the accord.
We also are very appreciative of the dedicated health transfer that is going to happen by the end of this next year, in regard to which the Auditor General said that we do not even know how much federal money is going in because the CHST has such fuzzy numbers. It is going to be split. To be able to add accountability to the health care system, we should be able to know how many dollars actually are being spent there.
It is very important that we discern and understand that we are on the right track, but we absolutely have to make sure that now that we are on solid footing, we put the interests of the patients first as we move forward in the 21st century to sustain health care.