Mr. Speaker, when the government was elected in 1993, Delta, a community of 100,000 people, had a fully operational community hospital with 65 acute care beds.
Today the Delta hospital has no acute care beds at all. All patients with acute care needs must be loaded back into ambulances and driven to a hospital with available acute care beds. Often there is nowhere to send them.
The closure of acute care beds in the Delta hospital followed the unilateral cuts to hospital funding instituted by the Prime Minister when he was finance minister. His attack on medical care has put the Delta hospital and community hospitals like it across the country on life support.
Every Canadian living outside the largest urban areas have been adversely affected by the Prime Minister's cuts to their community hospital and the medical services they provide.
When will the Prime Minister fully reinstate the hospital funding that he took away so that the Delta hospital and community hospitals like it throughout the country can reopen their acute care beds?