Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague from Algoma—Manitoulin for that excellent question because it gives me a chance to talk about something I had not talked about and had forgotten about briefly, which is of course accountability.
I can assure him that in my riding and in the forums I held accountability was a priority and an item that would come up frequently in people's comments. They wanted to see this money spent well. They wanted to see new money from the federal government to the provinces for health care being spent on health care. That was a vital concern of theirs, to ensure that it not be spent on things like lawn mowers or other things which we heard about, regrettably.
They also wanted to see measures of performance in health care that were independent of provincial governments. They wanted something of a national system, something like a national council like Roy Romanow suggested, that could look at how each province was performing and give people nationally a picture of how the health care systems in their own provinces were performing. They could then assess them in comparison to other provinces and try to determine whether people were really getting value for their money.
To me that is vital. It is something we have heard constantly. People say that it is costing more and more for health care. They believe they are paying enough money for health care and they should be able to have a very good publicly paid system. However they want to know that it is being managed well.
How do we do that if we do not have some system nationally of overseeing the system, of examining it, measuring it and comparing it as well as going over things like research and trying to ensure that we are going in the right direction, in a variety of ways, in improving the management of our health care system nationally? I constantly heard about this priority in Halifax West.
I was surprised that the representative from my province in those meetings, Jane Purves the minister of health, did not feel that accountability should be a priority. I think that as a result of the meetings, we do have some accountability process but I hope we can strengthen that in the future.