Mr. Chair, it has been a time of renaissance in terms of the kind of understanding the member shows on the importance of health promotion and disease prevention in terms of the ultimate sustainability of our health care system.
It was inspirational to see the Prime Minister and all first ministers make the kind of commitment they did in the first ministers' meeting to both disease prevention and health promotion. It was extraordinarily important for them to outline for all of us to do everything we can around choosing the health goals for Canadians as well as some targets, to be able to move, as the minister said, on these integrated disease strategies understanding how important the common risks to all of these diseases around cancer, heart disease and diabetes can be.
As the member so rightly pointed out, there was the importance of school health and the commitment that all governments made to a school health consortium and program that the Minister of Health was able to shepherd at the health ministers' meeting in September in Vancouver.
It is an exciting time but I probably would not have my job if it had not been for SARS. However, as we have had to deal with the threats of infectious diseases, we have been able to tuck in behind that the other epidemics of diabetes, cancer and heart disease.
We have been able to move forward on setting up a public health agency with the kind of real money that was invested in the 2004 budget and the $165 million that the finance minister was able to find for us. We are now able to do a much better job on disease surveillance, on health risk assessments and on the kinds of things we want to do around the determinants of health in the collaborating centre in Atlantic Canada and in the other collaborating centres.
The $300 million commitment that was made to the provinces for immunization and the $100 million commitment to enhance local public health was also important. As members know, officials are working hard every day with their local voluntary organizations to help do exactly as the member suggested in terms of disease prevention and health promotion.
As I think the member knows, we actually do need the data to support the surveillance that we need to do on both the health status of Canadians and particularly our aboriginal people. We were thrilled to give $100 million to the Canada Health Infoway to begin incorporating the good work it is doing on the electronic health record into proper surveillance on public health.
We will need the support of members as we go into the next budget cycle to make sure we have the dollars we need to do the shared goal of keeping as many Canadians healthy for as long as possible.